“Skill is successfully walking a tightrope between the twin towers of New York's World Trade Center. Intelligence is not trying.”

“The world should have stopped, but it didn't. The world kept on going. How can the world just keep on going? An earthquake in India kills a thousand people, and the world keeps on going. A famine in China kills a million people, and the world keeps on going. The twin towers of the World Trade Center buckle and fall, and the world, the world keeps on going.”

“She walks a tightrope between psycho and smokin'.”

“The subtlest change in New York is something people don't speak much about but that is in everyone's mind. The city, for the first time in its long history, is destructible. A single flight of planes no bigger than a wedge of geese can quickly end this island fantasy, burn the towers, crumble the bridges, turn the underground passages into lethal chambers, cremate the millions. The intimation of mortality is part of New York now: in the sound of jets overhead, in the black headlines of the latest edition. (Written in 1949, 22 years before the World Trade Center was completed.)”

“Were it that intelligence, skill, or quality were prime determinants of success, I might have an easier time of it.”

“The New York Dolls were toweringly influential. They were way ahead of their time, although always reliably late at the hairdressers.”