Country ham is baked whole, usually with a glaze, sometimes studded with cloves, and served as the centerpiece of Christmas and Easter feasts.

Friendship is a strange animal. It only thrives in voluntary enjoyment of each other's company, in the pleasure of nonobligatory connection. I repeat: You owe me nothing.

Thank God for my hobgoblin, small-minded consistency.

I've always subscribed to the notion that a writer always has something else to say, and the more you write, the more you have to write about, because the act of writing is self-generating.

Sometimes I think of blogging as finger exercises for a violinist; sometimes I think of it as mulching a garden. It is incredibly useful and helpful to my "real" writing.

Another benefit is that the more I blog, the more I maintain and develop a first-person voice, which translates into a much greater ease with writing personal essays.

Although the point of blogging is that it doesn't pay, I often steal from my blog for paid publication. I've based several magazine essays on blog posts, as well as an entire book.

Turning the blog into a book was extremely difficult, a tremendous amount of sustained, hard work. Blogging is easy; writing a book is difficult.

Let nothing human be foreign to me

Everything that has ever happened to me is still all with me.

It happened every single day in Brooklyn: awaken to fresh glory, fall asleep to blight and ruin.

We are not born into the world. We are born into something that we make into the world.

Written in pain, written in aweBy a puzzled man who questionedWhat we were here for

I was just trying to open the doors... but walls fell down

Your pain and struggles only serve to remind you that you are alive.

When Americans shoot movies they aim at the entire planet. When the French make movies, they aim at Paris.

Focus on where you are instead of where you wish you were. The joy will follow.

The anoretic operates under the astounding illusion that she can escape the flesh, and, by association, the realm of emotions.

Totem poles and wooden masks no longer suggest tribal villages but fashionable drawing rooms in New York and Paris.

Did you hear?" he asked. "They found another body around nine this morning. It's the Ripper, definitely." "Good morning," I replied. "Morning. Listen to this. The second victim.

It was not seen that woman's place was in the home until she began to go out of it; the statement was a reply to an unspoken challenge, it was attempted resistance to irresistible change.