It won't be long before we'll be deafened by the screeches of whistles being blown by whistle-blowers blowing the whistle on themselves.

We are in the realm not of logic but of wistfulness, and I must maintain that wistfulness is a respectable, serious condition. How, otherwise, to account for much of one's life?

Who has the courage to set right those misperceptions that bring us love?

I certainly want to continue to write in a way that's intimate. I love books where you feel you're having a romance with the writer.

If what you want to do is write, then it's madness not to do it.

Sometimes to walk in shaded parts of Manhattan is to be inserted into a Magritte: the street is night while the sky is day.

I was just a boy on a boat in the universe.

The greater the novel, the more it is apt to embody the special, non-replicable properties of the written medium.

One of the great pluses of being an immigrant is you get to start again in terms of your identity. You get to shed the narratives which cling to you.

New York interposed itself, once and for all, between me and all other places of origin.

I'm completely cricketed out. If I never have to write another word about cricket again, I'll be a happy man.

We are what God has made us.

Well, in order to become a grown man, in order to become significant in my family and significant in my children's life, I had to learn my lessons.

Don’t let your life speed out of control. Live intentionally. Do something today that will last beyond your lifetime.

As soon as it is held that any belief, no matter what, is important for some other reason than that it is true, a whole host of evils is ready to spring up.

Food made by hand is an act of defiance and runs contrary to everything in our modernity. Find it; eat it; it will go. It has been around for millennia. Now it is evanescent, like a season.

Leadership is a matter of how to be, not how to do it.

If you laugh, you think, and you cry, that's a full day. That's a heck of a day. You do that seven days a week, you're going to have something special.

I'm more interested in the writing than in the content per se (good writing can be about wallpaper and I'll devour it).

With 'Blue Slide Park' I wanted to have a number one album, and I did do it, so I'm not mad at it, but that was its goal.

This age will die not as a result of some evil, but from a lack of passion.