I don’t care if New York avoided bankruptcy by substituting tourism for the garment business.
Did it ever occur to anyone that if you put nice libraries in public schools you wouldn’t have to put them in prisons?
Should you be a teenager blessed with uncommon good looks, document this state of affairs by the taking of photographs. It is the only way anyone will ever believe you in years to come.
I never would start writing before midnight and I would finish at, like, seven in the morning.
Children do not really need money. After all, they don’t have to pay rent or send mailgrams.
I have friends, some of whom are spectacularly good writers, who really want someone to edit them. I don’t register that impulse. It’s like the impulse for wanting a dog.
I’m very lazy, I hate to work.
Children are rarely in the position to lend one a truly interesting sum of money. There are, however, exceptions, and such children are an excellent addition to any party.
When I was a kid, the people of my generation didn’t want to be writers, they wanted to be rock stars. Rock and roll was not just entertainment, it was the center of people’s lives. When I was young, it was exciting and interesting.
When I was very little, say five or six, I became aware of the fact that people wrote books. Before that, I thought that God wrote books. I thought a book was a manifestation of nature, like a tree.
For the movie review columns, I always knew exactly what I was going to write about – the movies.
When you reach a certain age, suddenly there are lots of people younger than you, which is really startling.
I love being in love. I don’t think anything compares with it, though I consider it very disruptive.
I’ve always been old at heart.
Knowingness is sexy. The opposite of sexy is naivete.
I think humor is warmer, and wit is colder. Wit is judgment, whereas humor invites some sort of response.
There is nothing more mine than my writing, nothing I’m more proprietary about.
Never allow your child to call you by your first name. He hasn’t known you long enough.
Without these tourists, New York would be fantastic. I don’t want them to come. Stay home!
Smoking is the great romance of my lifetime. If I could find someone I wanted forty-five times a day, perhaps I could stop.