Top Highlights

• “No one should come to New York to live unless he is willing to be lucky.”
• Political language—and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservative to anarchist—is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.
• We don’t really know what we want to say until we try to write it, and in the gap between the thought and its expression we realize the bold idea has to be qualified or elaborated. We write more sentences. Then more. We are soon in the territory defined by the French mathematician Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) but associated with others, too: I would h...
• I asked where we were going with the narrative in The Waterworks (1994). “Writing a novel,” he rejoined, “is a lot like driving a car at night. You never see further than your headlights but you can make the whole trip that way.”
• I readily concede the value of Twitter as an alarm clock for news—opinion flashes, the swift formation of coalitions, and the instant exposure of absurdity.