What drives innovation is abundance and ease, not the pressure of scarcity.
Compassion, skepticism, and uncertainty rather than on dogma,
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...
This can shake you up, this business of things almost but not quite being the same. A pharmacy is not quite a drugstore; a brasserie is not quite a coffee shop; a lunch is not quite a lunch.
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...
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
Tenderness toward one's lost self is sentimental; tenderness toward one's lost longings is just life.
J.-P. Quélin: 'The voluptuous cruelty of filling pages is what kills us.' /289
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...
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...
You have taken part in the only really majestic choice we get to make in life, which is to continue it.
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...
There was a nook in the house that contained what they called the Turkish Room, which was for intimate conversation. And when my mother had her sixth birthday, her grandmother led her into the Turkish...
There are no atheists in foxholes, and no liberals in bar fights, and what
The logic of nationalism always flows downhill, toward the gutter.
It was odd, he thought... to be in love with a girl at once so musical and so heavily armed.
It is, I think, the journalist’s vice to believe that all history can instantly be reduced to experience: (Pierre, an out-of-work pipe fitter in the suburb of Boulougne, is typical of the new class of...
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.
How could I forget you, Darryl? You called me God.