“The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding.”

“He showed the world what can be done against the odds, against a superpower. He showed -- and this is where Vietnam and Iraq come in, that in a war between an imperialist occupier and the people who actually live there, the people will eventually prevail. They know the terrain. They have more at stake. They have nowhere else to go.”

“The world keeps ending but new people too dumb to know it keep showing up as if the fun's just started.”

“Americans have been conditioned to respect newness, whatever it costs them. ”

“Dreams come true. Without that possibility, nature would not incite us to have them. ”

“But cities aren’t like people; they live on and on, even though their reason for being where they are has gone downriver and out to sea.”

“I remember one English teacher in the eighth grade, Florence Schrack, whose husband also taught at the high school. I thought what she said made sense, and she parsed sentences on the blackboard and gave me, I'd like to think, some sense of English grammar and that there is a grammar, that those commas serve a purpose and that a sentence has a logic, that you can break it down. I've tried not to forget those lessons, and to treat the English language with respect as a kind of intricate tool.”