Commentary by J.-P. Quélin, food critic for Le Monde). [New York and London chefs] are cooking, he says, at a level of originality that defies judgment, defies criticism, defies the grammar of cuisine...
Yet human intelligence has another force, too: the sense of urgency that gives human smarts their drive. Perhaps our intelligence is not just ended by our mortality; to a great degree, it is our morta...
Wit and puns aren't just decor 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.
American long for a closed society in which everything can be bought, where laborers are either hidden away or dressed up as nonhumans, so as not to be disconcerting. This place is called Disney World
This is surely the most significant of the elements that Tolkien brought to fantasy.... his arranged marriage between the Elder Edda and "The Wind in the Willows"--big Icelandic romance and small-scal...
Whatever our official pieties, deep down we all believe in lives. The sternest formalists are the loudest gossips, and if you ask a cultural-studies maven who believes in nothing but collective forces...
Accepting the eventual certainty of defeat in turn liberates you to take real joy in any small victory, that one good kick. /225
Soccer writers seemed as starved for entertainment as art critics, anything vaguely enjoyable gets promoted to the level of genius. ~ 219
It is the vice of the journalist, I once wrote, to think that history can always be reduced to experience, and of the scholar to think that experience can always be reduced to history. History and exp...
Big writers become a kind of shared climate.
Sometimes crazy uncles—from Samuel Johnson to G. K. Chesterton.
There are at least three moments a month when you are ready to leap across a conter or a front seat to strangle someone: the woman at France Télecom who won't give you the fax ribbons that are there o...
Ask always what’s the best real possibility, not what’s the ultimate ideal imagining.
Quote by Robert, a garçon who accepted a 'fat envelope' to leave the Balzar: Anyway it is only in moments of crisis that we find lucidity about ourselves—though only after the crisis is over. Still, t...
Parisians believe they are superior by birth, they do not believe, as Americans do, that they are invulnerable by right.
In Paris explanations come in a predictable sequence, no matter what is being explained. First comes the explanation in terms of the unique, romantic individual, then the explanation in terms of ideol...
There are at least three moments a month when you are ready to leap across a counter or a front seat to strangle someone: the woman at France Télecom who won't give you the fax ribbons that are there...
One economic problem is especially acute here: Unemployment … Most of the other problems, the ones that create a sense of crisis, are anticipatory. They grow out of the fear that the right-wing govern...
The light obtained by setting straw men on fire is not what we mean by illumination.
We see life as deeply in our pleasures as in our pains.