The sublime moment of cooking, though, is really the moment when nature becomes culture, stuff becomes things. It is the moment when the red onions have been chopped and the bacon has been sliced into...
She always called him Luca, in the Italian manner, and said it with that funny trans-European intonation, the accent oddly placed on the first syllable: 'Where's Loo-ka?', just like Audrey Hepburn say...
Can't repeat the past? We do it every day. We build a life, or try to, of pleasures and duties that will become routine, so that every day will be the same day, or nearly so, the day of our life, Rand...
We breathe in our first language, and swim in our second.
67–If talking about the bureaucracy takes the place of talking about sports, getting involved with the bureaucracy takes the place of exercise. Every French man and woman is engaged in a constant enta...
What drives innovation is abundance and ease, not the pressure of scarcity.
Writers are married to their keyboards, as to their passports.
Tenderness toward one's lost self is sentimental; tenderness toward one's lost longings is just life.
I understand why people play [soccer]. ... I even learned how to talk the game. It was the opposite of trash talking—tidy talking. I suppose you'd have to call it. If you did something good, it was br...
You have taken part in the only really majestic choice we get to make in life, which is to continue it.
Parsley. Vegetables these days are chopped into tiny grass.
What was maddening was not the anti-Americanism, which is understandable and even, in its Astérix-style resistance to American domination, admirable. What is maddening is the bland certainty, the lack...
The world was once haunted by Titus Oates’s self-made epitaph: I am going outside and may be some time. Well, we are going inside and may be some time, we are inside, and have been for awhile. The poe...
The trouble with mental catch is that the ball you throw changes in midair into another. –109
J.-P. Quélin: 'The voluptuous cruelty of filling pages is what kills us.' /289
I love you forever' really means 'Just trust me for now,' which is all it ever means, and we just hope to keep renewing the now, year after year.
Ever since, New York has existed for me simultaneously as a map to be learned and a place to aspire too--a city of things and a city of signs, the place I actually am and the place I would like to be...
Writing well isn't just a question of winsome expression, but of having found something big and true to say and having found the right words to say it in, of having seen something large and having fou...
Whenever I am feeling blue, I like to go to the Balzar and watch a waiter gravely transfer a steak au poivre and its accompaniments from an oval platter to a plate, item by item. It reaffirms my faith...
What made me sad just then was the new knowledge that things changed, and there was nothing you could do about it. In a way, that was a Parisian emotion too.