Cooking is the showy side of domesticity.

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.

We breathe in our first language, and swim in our second.

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

In the New Yorker library, I have long been shelved between Nadine Gordimer and Brendan Gill; an eerie little space nestled between high seriousness of purpose and legendary lightness of touch.

In bookstores, my stuff is usually filed in the out-of-the-way, additional interest sections.