“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.

Fanaticism comes in as many flavors as there are human beings.

For a first look at someone we may sleep with, or a last look at someone we love.

Credibility’ is defined as the willingness to kill a lot of people now for a not very good cause to assure the world that we’ll kill a lot more people if we can find a better one.

Drawing need not be the bones of art, but skill must always be the skeleton of accomplishment.

Dinner with water is dinner for prisoners

Sometimes having a good time can be the outward evidence of a deep re-thinking.

Drawing is one of those things which sit on the uneasy bending line between instinct and instruction, where seeming perversity eventually trumps pleasure as the card players and the kibitzers interact and new thrills are sought.

When handsome men or beautiful women take up the work of the intellect, it impresses us because we know they could have chosen other paths to being impressive.

Often the block [in writing] comes from the wall of words that keep out the simplicity of sense.

That, you could conclude mordantly, is the real soundtrack of our time: the amplification of the self-evident toward the creation of paralyzing, preëmptive paranoia.

For all the years I’d spent talking about pictures, the truth was that I had no idea how to draw or what it felt like to do it. I