“As drivers desert the city I find myself clinging more and more to my father’s belief that a man without a car is not really a man.”

I would go swaggering into restaurants in some ridiculous tramp disguise, challenging them to mistreat me, order the things I was least likely to enjoy, then hurl my plate aside in a fury and demand to see the manager.

Of course you can get a decent mouthful of food in New York. You can get a decent mouthful of food in Nairobi.

Where my dad taught me everything about writing, Graham Paterson, who gave me my first job at The Times, taught me everything about journalism, which is that it’s no big deal, and it’s more important to have a glass of wine.

I used to be so angry. I think back to my early days as a critic in the late 1990s, and I blush.

It was fine for my Polish Ashkenazi forebears to live on dumplings and potatoes, because they laboured in the fields. But that diet is unsuitable for an urban lifestyle.

I’m not a mad, crazy foodie. But I have strong opinions and I know a lot about food.

I used to be a very angry person, I used to throw things and break them. Then I had five years of constant psycho-analysis, and I don’t get angry any more.

I let the other reviewers eat the bad meals, so that I didn’t have to, and my wife and I went out only for the good stuff. And I wrote mostly positive reviews. Not only. But mostly. And, ooooh, it felt an awful lot better.

We built walls around them with slits through which to fire arrows at scary, cross-eyed rural people, and brought our food and family inside because they were the safest places to be.

I always say what I think to be amusing.

When I was 16 my dad taught me to drive too. Furiously. Unable to understand why I couldn’t already do it – for driving, to him, was innate in the human. It was what separated us from the apes. And from the French, who weren’t much good at it either.

You can get a decent mouthful of food in Warsaw or Chad if you look hard enough. It’s just I wouldn’t actually go there looking for the food.

My sister’s also very, very competitive but she is more concerned than I am with being liked. So she hides it away. I try to make my competitiveness part of my charm.

My time in Paris was an education in both the grimness of a relentless, grinding day job and the joys of nights in glittering restaurants.

The first thing I remember is that my dad had a big iron Olivetti typewriter and he worked all night.

The good fortune of my life, which has been to turn those glittering nights into my job, all came from there.

Beautiful fans of Oklahoma City, I can’t say enough about you guys. All the support you give our team. The home-court advantage we have is the best I’ve ever seen. We disappoint you sometimes, but we try our best every single night to win for you guys. And we want to win a championship for you guys.

It is the city of mirrors, the city of mirages, at once solid and liquid, at once air and stone.

And I’ve discovered a strikingly consistent pattern: grit and age go hand in hand. Sixty-somethings tend to be grittier, on average, than fifty-somethings, who are in turn grittier than forty-somethings, and so on.

I grew up in the inner city of Chicago, and then I moved to Robbins, and it kind of raised me.

The city of Memphis has demonstrated that neither character nor standing avails the Negro if he dares to protect himself against the white man or become his rival.

This city, all they want us to be is ourselves. You love us how we are. We’re all a work in progress as men and you still love us and I thank you so much for embracing us.

Paris is a city of centralisation–and centralisation and classification are closely allied. In the early times, when centralisation is becoming a fact, its forerunner is classification. All things which are similar or analogous become grouped together, and from the grouping of groups rises one whole or central point.

There are roughly three New Yorks. There is, first, the New York of the man or woman who was born here, who takes the city for granted and accepts its size and its turbulence as natural and inevitable. Second, there is the New York of the commuter.