New York is the only city in the world where you can get run down on the sidewalk by a pedestrian.

An educated person is one who has learned that information almost always turns out to be at best incomplete and very often false, misleading, fictitious, mendacious - just dead wrong.

The people who are always hankering loudest for some golden yesteryear usually drive new cars.

Usually, terrible things that are done with the excuse that progress requires them are not really progress at all, but just terrible things.

The only thing I was fit for was to be a writer, and this notion rested solely on my suspicion that I would never be fit for real work, and that writing didn't require any.

The worst thing about being a tourist is having other tourists recognize you as a tourist.

What the New Yorker calls home would seem like a couple of closets to most Americans, yet he manages not only to live there but also to grow trees and cockroaches right on the premises.

In an age when the fashion is to be in love with yourself, confessing to be in love with somebody else is an admission of unfaithfulness to one's beloved.

Americans like fat books and thin women.

A solved problem creates two new problems, and the best prescription for happy living is not to solve any more problems.

It seems to be a law in American life that whatever enriches us anywhere except in the wallet inevitably becomes uneconomic.

My father just got out of the Betty Ford Clinic. He's in his 60s, and this was the first time he ever did anything like that.

If notwithstanding, a Rebellion of the same Kind now afflicts this Country, we should not infer that this Institution is useless, or should be laid aside; but just the Reverse.

A liberal: someone who thinks he knows more about your experience than you do.

Don't buy into the notion that mistakes can somehow be avoided. They can't be.

So when Putin goes out to buy a Coke, thirty seconds later it is known in Washington DC.

In the technical realm, we repeatedly enter into a series of social contracts, the terms of which are revealed only after the signing.

The problem with death is absence

When the saint ceases to seek after holiness, purity, righteousness, truth; when he ceases to pray, stops reading the Word and gives way to carnal appetites, then it is that Satan comes.

Jazz is my adventure. I'm after new chords, new ways of syncopating, new figures, new runs. How to use notes differently. That's it. Just using notes differently.

I had a wonderful time playing Dr. Kaufman in Tomorrow Never Dies. It was a real Bond villain, over the top, almost laughable but dangerous.