“Only a person who is congenially self-centered has the effrontery and the stamina to write essays”

I am always humbled by the infite ingenuity of the Lord, who can make a red barn cast a blue shadow.

A right is a responsibility in reverse.

Television will enormously enlarge the eye’s range, and, like radio, will advertise the Elsewhere. Together with the tabs, the mags, and the movies, it will insist that we forget the primary and the near in favor of the secondary and the remote.

To achieve style, begin by affecting none.

Sailors have an expression about the weather: they say the weather is a great bluffer. I guess the same is true of our human society – things can look dark, then a break shows in the clouds, and all is changed.

Children are game for anything. I throw them hard words, and they backhand them over the net. They love words that give them a hard time, provided they are in a context that absorbs their attention.

Writing is one way to go about thinking, and the practice and habit of writing not only drain the mind but supply it, too.

Loneliness is a strange gift.

Well,” said Stuart, “a misspelled word is an abomination in the sight of everyone.

The essayist is a self-liberated man, sustained by the childish belief that everything he thinks about, everything that happens to him, is of general interest.

The whole problem is to establish communication with ones self.

The city that is devoured by locusts each day and spat out each night. Third, there is the New York of the person who was born somewhere else and came to New York in quest of something.

I admire anybody who has the guts to write anything at all.

A good farmer is nothing more nor less than a handy man with a sense of humus.

Use the smallest word that does the job.

Writing is hard work and bad for the health.

The true natural check on absolute democracy is the federal system, which limits the central government by the powers reserved, and the state governments by the powers they have ceded.

One central need in life is to fulfill its own potential.

I’m the only woman who can walk in Central Park at night… and reduce the crime rate.

The uplands of my home country in north central Kentucky are sloping and easily eroded, dependent for safekeeping upon year-round cover of perennial plants.

If a man were to look over the fence on one side of his garden and observe that the neighbor on his left had laid his garden path round a central lawn; and were to look over the fence on the other side of his garden and observe that the neighbor on his right had laid his path down the middle of the lawn.

Envy is the central fact of American life.

The cardinal responsibility of leadership is to identify the dominant contradiction at each point of the historical process and to work out a central line to resolve it.

My heart breaks. Really, I have tears in my eyes. Central midfield is Shinji’s best role.