Good editorial writing has less to do with winning an argument, since the other side is mostly not listening, than with telling the guys on your side how they ought to sound when they’re arguing.
The special virtue of freedom is not that it makes you richer and more powerful but that it gives you more time to understand what it means to be alive.
Of all the unexpected things in contemporary literature, this is among the oddest: that kids have an inordinate appetite for very long, very tricky, very strange books about places that don’t exist.
Yet human intelligence has another force, too: the sense of urgency that gives human smarts their drive. Perhaps our intelligence is not just ended by our mortality; to a great degree, it is our mortality.
Wit and puns aren’t just decor in the mind; they’re essential signs that the mind knows it’s on, recognizes its own software, can spot the bugs in its own program.
What drives innovation is abundance and ease, not the pressure of scarcity.
There is, I believe now, a force in stories, words in motion, that either drives them forward past things into feelings or doesn’t. Sometimes the words fly over the fence and all the way out to the feelings.
We breathe in our first language, and swim in our second.
The light obtained by setting straw men on fire is not what we mean by illumination.
[A]s military history reveals, a bad plan is often better than no plan, especially if the people on the other side think it’s a good plan.
Going to a restaurant is one of my keenest pleasures. Meeting someplace with old and new friends, ordering wine, eating food, surrounded by strangers, I think is the core of what it means to live a civilised life.
The World Series is played in my doubtless too-nostalgic imagination in some kind of autumn afternoon light, and seeing it exclusively in the bitter chill of midnight breaks the spell of even the best of games.