“Would mistrust a poetry critic who couldn’t produce a rhyming couplet. Could one write about art without knowing how to draw?”

I think – the more sentences you write, the more sentences you have written, if that slightly Zen confection makes any sense.

Merely that you start off with ideas buzzing around in your head, and then you try to give them the simpler, more graceful shape, of a feeling that a reader might share.

Big writers become a kind of shared climate.

What do you think leads us to the windows in the first place?

The light in your eyes shines because of the longing in your soul. And the longing in your souls rises because you are looking for the lost half minute.

That any troubles are simple misunderstandings, consequent on your not yet having spoken English loudly enough.

The reality is that the British monarchy, for good or ill, is a modern political institution – perhaps the first modern political institution.

I think I’m more intensely opinionated when I speak; more agreeably balanced when I write.

Art without accomplishment becomes a form of faith, sustained more by the intensity of its common practice than by the pleasure it gives to its adherents in private.

We breathe in our first language, and swim in our second.

The grace of capitalism is to make wants feel like hopes, so that material objects and stuff can feel like the possibility of something heroic and civic.

Going to a restaurant is one of my keenest pleasures. Meeting someplace with old and new friends, ordering wine, eating food, surrounded by strangers

All tastes have the quality of being in some way artificial and invented. The secret of life is to have enough detachment from your tastes and your values to see that they are a little bit absurd.

We don’t know that we’ve lost half a minute from our lives but we feel it somehow, we feel its absence.

Wit and puns aren’t just décor in the mind; they’re essential signs that the mind knows it’s on, recognizes its own software, can spot the bugs in its own program.

The coffee shop is a great New York institution, but it has terrible coffee. And the more traditional coffee shops are trying to catch up with more sophisticated coffee drinkers.

Once killing starts, it is difficult to draw the line.

It is not down in any map; true places never are.

There’s magic in the water that draws all men away form the land, that leads them over hills, down creeks and streams and rivers to the sea.

O’er Ocean, with a thousand masts, sails forth the stripling bold- One boat, hard rescued from the deep, draws into port the old!

May I stay soft and delicate in this world meant to draw out the brute in me.

What reason, like the careful ant, draws laboriously together, the wind of accident sometimes collects in a moment.

A good advertisement is one which sells the product without drawing attention to itself.

They looked great, you know the drawings of the guys playing looked great and bits of string around their necks. So it didn’t seem to be that difficult a thing to do, or that inaccessible.