"Professionalism in art has this difficulty: To be professional is to be dependable, to be dependable is to be predictable, and predictability is esthetically boring - an anti-virtue in a field where we hope to be astonished and startled and at some deep level refreshed."
"Dreams come true. Without that possibility, nature would not incite us to have them."
"Being able to write becomes a kind of shield, a way of hiding, a way of too instantly transforming pain into honey."
"Humor is my default mode."
"Rain is grace; rain is the sky descending to the earth; without rain, there would be no life."
"The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding."