We must all face the fact that in a single lifetime we lead several simultaneous lives; our intention should be to make them reinforce one another instead of colliding.

Not a shred of evidence exists in favor of the idea that life is serious.

Parody is homage gone sour.

I will try to cram these paragraphs full of facts and give them a weight and shape no greater than that of a cloud of blue butterflies.

Wars and elections are both too big and too small to matter in the long run.

Obscenity is a notable enhancer of life and is suppressed at grave peril to the arts.

To die quickly in one's eighth decade at the very top of one's powers is an enviable end, and not an occasion for mourning.

The ingenuities we practice in order to appear admirable to ourselves would suffice to invent the telephone twice over on a rainy summer morning.

Avain attempt to subdue that unsubduable country.

It is in the nature of the New Yorker to be as topical as possible, on a level that is often small in scale and playful in intention.

If it were better, it wouldn't be as good.

Youth sports could not exist without millions of volunteers and modestly paid coaches who teach our children how to skate and catch and dribble and also how to get along with others.

I think success right now is not about how famous you are or how much you're getting paid, but it's more about if you're steadily working and you're happy with what you're doing.

If you're running a dictatorship, you don't really have to worry about the welfare or the property rights of the ordinary citizen. Only the people who keep you in power, a very small group, matter.

I've gone through my whole life caring deeply what people think of me.

The story does what no theorem can quite do. It may not be "like real life" in the superficial sense: but it sets before us an image of what reality may well be like at some more central region.

Even the righteous man is just a sinner living in between sins.

You have a ready wit. Tell me when it's ready.

I hadn't seen my dad get violent since the Great Spatula Incident, and I wasn't anxious to see a repeat of that.

The guiding principle of my life, 'the means are the ends,' has taught me that our participation in a corrupt system facilitates it and corrupts and therefore defeats us.

You get to the ninth inning and your stomach is clear up to here. But it's not because of your job. It is because you want to win so badly.