“I still think the best classic meal in New York is a coffee-shop breakfast – you sort of can’t skip it.”

Over all, there are now more people under “correctional supervision” in America-more than six million-than were in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin at its height.

American long for a closed society in which everything can be bought, where laborers are either hidden away or dressed up as nonhumans, so as not to be disconcerting. This place is called Disney World.

This alchemy, of self-absorption into shared experience, is the alchemy of all literature.

The sin of capitalism, perhaps, is to make wants feel like needs, to give to simple silly stuff the urgency of near-physical necessity: I must have it.

The trick and the trap and the horror is not faith, Scott. I don’t think the trap and the horror is fanaticism.

Women choose Alice [in Wonderland] because every woman sees herself as the only reasonable creature among crazy people who think they are disinherited monarchs

Nothing in a graduate degree in art history prepares you for the eloquence of the eraser.

I think is the core of what it means to live a civilised life.

We call disasters unimaginable, but all we do is imagine such things. […]

Tomorrow may be a bit better than today; and, after all, you have to have a little faith in people-doesn’t diminish the glamour that clings to the man who turned the question over and look at it, elegantly, upside down.

You can’t have a decent food culture without a decent coffee culture: the two things grow up together.

Protein was the most valued ingredient 250 years ago: It was the rarest thing. Now the rarest thing we have is time: time to cook and time to eat.

There are two kinds of travelers. There is the kind who goes to see what there is to see, and the kind who has an image in his head and goes out to accomplish it.

You learn to sing with, not argue at, your possible readers.

I don’t think there’s any question journalists have become targets, but then I think that – that anyone who tries to practice liberty becomes a target of fanatics.

Music is a current of hard choices made to seem easy by the mind.

The next day, she was silent. For breakfast, she murdered an onion and served it raw.

The first duty of a revolutionist is to get away with it. The second duty is to eat breakfast. I ain’t going.

The first duty of a revolutionary is to get away with it. The second duty is to eat breakfast. I ain’t going.

Breakfast is everything. The beginning, the first thing. It is the mouthful that is the commitment to a new day, a continuing life.

Don’t ask what things I’ll have for breakfast come over to me, Let me have you this morning.

Sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.

The rule is, jam tomorrow and jam yesterday – but never jam today.

A lot of people think the Breakfast for Children program is charity. But what does it do? It takes the people from a stage to another stage. Any program that’s revolutionary is an advancing program. Revolution is change.