“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.”

Never hurry and never worry!

Every morning I awake torn between a desire to save the world and an inclination to savor it. This makes it hard to plan the day. But if we forget to savor the world, what possible reason do we have for saving it? In a way, the savoring must come first.

And then, just as Wilbur was settling down for his morning nap, he heard again the thin voice that had addressed him the night before. “Salutations!” said the voice. Wilbur jumped to his feet. “Salu-what?” he cried. “Salutations!” repeated the voice.

If a man is to be obsessed by something, I suppose a boat is as good as anything, perhaps a bit better than most.

An editor is a person who knows more about writing than writers do but who has escaped the terrible desire to write.

When I get sick of what men do, I have only to walk a few steps in another direction to see what spiders do. Or what the weather does. This sustains me very well indeed.

I would feel more optimistic about a bright future for man if he spent less time proving that he can outwit Nature and more time tasting her sweetness and respecting her seniority.

Before the seed there comes the thought of bloom.

No one can write decently who is distrustful of the reader’s intelligence or whose attitude is patronizing.

There is nothing harder to estimate than a writer’s time, nothing harder to keep track of. There are moments—moments of sustained creation—when his time is fairly valuable; and there are hours and hours when a writer’s time isn’t worth the paper he is not writing anything on.

Writing is both mask and unveiling.

Extreme cold when it first arrives seems to generate cheerfulness and sociability. For a few hours all life’s dubious problems are dropped in favor of the clear and congenial task of keeping alive.

Nauseous. Nauseated. The first means “sickening to contemplate”; the second means “sick at the stomach.” Do not, therefore, say “I feel nauseous,” unless you are sure you have that effect on others.

“What are they, and where are you?” screamed Wilbur. “Please, please, tell me where you are. And what are salutations?” “Salutations are greetings,” said the voice. “When I say ‘salutations,’ it’s just my fancy way of saying hello or good morning.

Everything in life is somewhere else, and you get there in a car.

There are roughly three New Yorks. There is, first, the New York of the man or woman who was born here, who takes the city for granted and accepts its size and its turbulence as natural and inevitable. Second, there is the New York of the commuter.

It’s a kind of madness in cosmopolitan cities now.

A lumberman will look at a forest and see so many board feet of lumber. I see a living city.

I’m from Samoan heritage, and with the rugby in our blood and everything,

In London, you’ll be walking around and, ‘Oh, there’s the ground.’ Every area of the city has a Premier League club. They all survive; they all exist with enough money, and that’s good.

In England, you have stadiums in the middle of the city.

Happiness is having a large, loving, caring, close-knit family in another city.

We grew up in the Rose Park section of Salt Lake City. It’s a good neighborhood but a tough one, on the poor side but proud.

I want to give that world to someone else. Most people in the city rush around so, they have no time to look at a flower. I want them to see it whether they want to or not.