The light obtained by setting straw men on fire is not what we mean by illumination.
I remember looking out the window of the little maid's room where we had been installed, seeing the lights of the Palisades across the way, and thinking, There! There it is! There's New York, this won...
In Paris restaurants can actually go into a kind of hibernation for years and awaken in a new generation: Lapérouse, the famous swanky nineteenth-century spot, has, after a long stretch of being overl...
I suppose we couldn't realize, or could realize but couldn't accept, that the logic of business is not a logic in that sense. It's not only a narrow consideration of profits and losses, but a larger l...
Competing absolutisms respect each other more than either respects those who are allergic to absolutes as an absolute principle.
The World Series is played in my doubtless too-nostalgic imagination in some kind of autumn afternoon light, and seeing it exclusively in the bitter chill of midnight breaks the spell of even the best...
The French believe that all errors are distant, someone else's fault. Americans believe that there is no distance, no difference, and therefore that there are no errors, that any troubles are simple m...
We pursued the muses, instead of the mirrors.
The loneliness of the expatriate is of an odd and complicated kind, for it is inseparable from the feeling of being free, of having escaped.
We had moved in a single November night from ideology to politics—from what you _want_ to what you do—with the usual disappointing results. /284
There is a book to be written, for instance, on small errors in subtitles. In the Fred Astaire musical Royal Wedding, for instance, the English girl he falls for, played by Sarah Churchill (daughter o...
Oliver, success is usually a feeling of mere relief, where failure is pain. Happiness, you see, lies in neither, but in sticking to a daily ritual and becoming absorbed in something useful. When the w...
How could I forget you, Darryl? You called me God.
Going to a restaurant is one of my keenest pleasures. Meeting someplace with old and new friends, ordering wine, eating food, surrounded by strangers, I think is the core of what it means to live a ci...
The special virtue of freedom is not that it makes you richer and more powerful but that it gives you more time to understand what it means to be alive.
Compassion, skepticism, and uncertainty rather than on dogma,
There is, I believe now, a force in stories, words in motion, that either drives them forward past things into feelings or doesn't. Sometimes the words fly over the fence and all the way out to the fe...
Paris, on the other hand, looked exactly as it was supposed to look. It wore its heart on its sleeve, and the strange thing was that the heart it wore so openly was in other ways so closed-mysterious,...
Good editorial writing has less to do with winning an argument, since the other side is mostly not listening, than with telling the guys on your side how they ought to sound when they're arguing.
That people don’t speak in theories, that the theories they employ change, flexibly, and of necessity, from moment to moment in conversation, that the notion of limiting conversation to a rigid rule o...