Politics: where fat, bald, disagreeable men, unable to be candidates themselves, teach a president how to act on a public stage.

Don't trust a brilliant idea unless it survives the hangover.

If a man, for private profit, tears at the public news, does so with the impatience of one who thinks he actually owns the news you get, it is against the national interest.

Rage is ... This is Breslin's full quote: Rage is the only quality which has kept me, or anybody I have ever studied, writing columns for newspapers

When you stop drinking, you have to deal with this marvelous personality that started you drinking in the first place.

The office of president is a bastardized thing, half royalty and half democracy that nobody knows whether to genuflect or spit.

When you leave New York you ain't going anywhere.

That's the horrible thing starting out, you get distracted a lot because anything is easier than writing. It's just the same enemy - blank paper.

The test of a good idea is its ability to last through a hangover

True New Yorkers do not really seek information about the outside world. They feel that if anything is not in New York it is not likely to be interesting.

Media, the plural of mediocrity.

Without confidence we feel insecure. We replay the doubting voices of our parents on a loop in our own minds.

In all affairs love religion politics or business it's a healthy idea now and then to hang a question mark on things you have long taken for granted.

Is the painter a plagiarist because he sets his palette to nature?

I learned to dance at quinceañeras - big [15th] birthday parties for Spanish girls. It was always funny to bring the white guy out [on the floor] and let him look like a fool.

After speech, silence is the greatest power in the world.

Is it even always an advantage to replace an indistinct picture by a sharp one? Isn't the indistinct one often what we need?

I don't know if there is any specific way to handle emotional pain. Loved ones, music, and self-medicating seem to help me.

The threat of a new ice age must now stand alongside nuclear war as a likely source of wholesale death and misery for mankind.

Children have two visions, the inner and the outer. Of the two the inner vision is brighter.

The women of the country have the power in their own hands, in spite of the law and the government being altogether of the male order.