“I think that we’re always drawn – particularly sophisticated people – are always drawn to the idea of simplicity.”

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

Of all the alchemies of human connection-sex and childbirth and marriage and friendship-the strangest is this:

The blankness invites scribbling on, mental drawing , and the best feeling I know – apart from the more obvious sensual ones – is the feeling of putting down the first thought and seeing it turn into symbols.

Men choose Hamlet because every man sees himself as a disinherited monarch. .

In an age of malice and bad faith on many sides, I reread White or Thurber or Mitchell and am reminded again that good writing is done, as I said in my elegy for Salinger, with an active eye and ear and an ardent heart, and in no other way.

Something is missing, we think. And so we long for the thing we’ve missed and can’t name, and out of that wanting – well, everything else rises, good and bad.

Americans also seem to believe that the monarchy is a kind of mediaeval hangover, encumbered by premodern notions of decorum

In the New Yorker library, I have long been shelved between Nadine Gordimer and Brendan Gill; an eerie little space nestled between high seriousness of purpose and legendary lightness of touch.

The mind is like a richly woven tapestry in which the colors are distilled from the experiences of the senses, and the design drawn from the convolutions of the intellect.

Ah, we men and women are like ropes drawn tight with strain that pull us in different directions.

No man knows till he experiences it, what it is like to feel his own life-blood drawn away into the woman he loves.

Better than any argument is to rise at dawn and pick dew-wet red berries in a cup.

I started reading about people of great accomplishment… and it dawned on me suddenly that the person who has the most to do with what happens in your life is you.

There is a line drawn by God, a boundary where by virtue of his own very presence Satan’s writ does not run. Let God but occupy all the space himself, and what room is left for the evil one?

He knew them only ‘in Braille’ – the curtains were never drawn back in the rooms in Oxford where he met those boys. It was the most sordid life you can imagine. And he was bleating about love and dragging the fair name of Mr. Plato into the trial – after a life like that?

The nearer the dawn the darker the night.