“Writing is a manual labor of the mind: a job, like laying pipe.”

“Only World War II, which mobilized 10 million draftees, could by any stretch of the imagination be called a people's war.”

“New York is at once cosmopolitan and parochial, a compendium of sentimental certainties. It is in fact the most sentimental of the world's great cities - in its self-congratulation a kind of San Fr...”

“I often think about dogs when I think about work and retirement. There are many breeds of dog that just need to be working, and useful, or have a job of some kind, in order to be happy. Otherwise t...”

“Making a Christmas album is looked upon by some people as the thing you do when you are heading towards retirement.”

“Retirement at sixty-five is ridiculous. When I was sixty-five I still had pimples.”

“They had killed themselves over our dying forests, over manatees maimed by propellers as they surfaced to drink from garden hoses; they had killed themselves at the sight of used tires stacked high...”

“The world seemed to shimmer a little at the edges.”

“If we cannot accept the importance of the world, which considers itself important, if in the midst of that world our laughter finds no echo, we have but one choice: to take the world as a whole and...”

“The stars were extra bright tonight, and they shone and glimmered as if each one had something it wanted to say.”

“I was a teen star. That's disgusting enough.”

“Architecture is a rare collective profession: it's always exercised by groups. There is an essential modesty, which is a complete contradiction to the notion of a star.”