“Writing doesn’t come easily to anyone, I think, certainly not to me. But pressure and practice does lend a certain fluency”

What drives innovation is abundance and ease, not the pressure of scarcity.

The future will be like the past, in the sense that, no matter how amazing or technologically advanced a society becomes

I think if journalists start doing that then they won’t be practicing journalism. If satirists start doing that then they won’t be practicing satire.

Of all the unexpected things in contemporary literature, this is among the oddest: that kids have an inordinate appetite for very long, very tricky, very strange books about places that don’t exist…

It was the grander French one: Why not kill yourself tonight? That the answers come to much the same thing in the end-easy does it

I don’t miss the obligation to be opinionated, but I do regret the chance to share a joy.

For me, the beauty of the blank page, or empty screen,staring up at nine thirty after two cups of coffee and a deep breath remains unique.

A fact about photography: we can look at people’s faces in photographs with an intensity and intimacy that in life we normally only reserve for extreme emotional states

The World Series is played in my doubtless too-nostalgic imagination in some kind of autumn afternoon light, and seeing it exclusively in the bitter chill of midnight breaks the spell of even the best of games.

Paris, on the other hand, looked exactly as it was supposed to look. It wore its heart on its sleeve, and the strange thing was that the heart it wore so openly was in other ways so closed-mysterious, uninviting.

In bookstores, my stuff is usually filed in the out-of-the-way, additional interest sections.

It mocks mercilessly the pretensions to truth of Mormonism and the pretensions to virtue of Mormon missionaries.

The loneliness of the expatriate is of an odd and complicated kind, for it is inseparable from the feeling of being free, of having escaped.

After all, spinning is its own reward. There wouldn’t be carousels if it weren’t so.

I think the worst thing we can do is to concede to fanaticism its devotion, say. Well, you have to understand, these people are really fanatics, so we should back down from them.

If we are willing to act violently in pursuit of a peripheral interest, everyone can be certain that, when a vital interest is at stake, we will be still more violent.

I would never do a commercial if I thought it was offensive to anyone.

I never met anyone who didn’t have a very smart child. What happens to these children, you wonder, when they reach adulthood?

I can take more punishment than anyone in the business.

Never give anyone the advice to buy or sell shares, because the most benevolent price of advice can turn out badly.

However greatly we distrust the sincerity of those we converse with, yet still we think they tell more truth to us than to anyone else.

Perfect valour consists in doing without witnesses that which we would be capable of doing before everyone.

How can we expect another to keep our secret if we have been unable to keep it ourselves?

Anyone who has proclaimed violence his method inexorably must choose lying as his principle.