I try to turn a written thing, when I’m in trouble with it, into a spoken thing: I start imagining what I would say to someone if I were trying to tell the story or make the argument.

Someone once said that the joy is not in writing but in having written. I can’t say I find that to be true, though I understand the sentiment.

Can’t repeat the past? We do it every day. We build a life, or try to, of pleasures and duties that will become routine, so that every day will be the same day, or nearly so, “the day of our life,” Randall Jarrell called it.

This can shake you up, this business of things almost but not quite being the same. A pharmacy is not quite a drugstore; a brasserie is not quite a coffee shop; a lunch is not quite a lunch.

I think that we’re always drawn – particularly sophisticated people – are always drawn to the idea of simplicity.

There are as many attitudes to cooking as there are people cooking, of course, but I do think that cooking guys tend – I am a guilty party here – to take, or get, undue credit for domestic virtue, when in truth cooking is the most painless and, in its ways, ostentatious of the domestic chores.

The French believe that all errors are distant, someone else’s fault. Americans believe that there is no distance, no difference, and therefore that there are no errors, that any troubles are simple misunderstandings, consequent on your not yet having spoken English loudly enough.

I still think the best classic meal in New York is a coffee-shop breakfast – you sort of can’t skip it.

I don’t miss the obligation to be opinionated, but I do regret the chance to share a joy.

Writing doesn’t come easily to anyone, I think, certainly not to me. But pressure and practice does lend a certain fluency, I think – the more sentences you write, the more sentences you have written, if that slightly Zen confection makes any sense.