Know your load. That’s rule numero uno in this business, which is why I make them count the penguins out in front of me one at a time. I’m not going to be the schmuck...

Battery Park resonates with lust as the sun approaches its zenith. A primal impulse takes hold of the young couples strolling the gravel walkways, the newlyweds who have paused to admire DeModica’s bronze bull, the...

The most dangerous ideas are not those that challenge the status quo. The most dangerous ideas are those so embedded in the status quo, so wrapped in a cloud of inevitability, that we forget they...

Be optimistic. Always put on clean underwear if you’re going on a date.

If God wanted teenagers to be abstinent, puberty would begin at twenty.

Starshine’s greatest challenge is deciding whether a woman is too young to soothe or too old to shame. Handling the men is much easier. They may feign interest in figures and photos, but their underlying...

Another family crisis: The rabbit goes blind.

This is how most stories end in the hospital. Not with crash carts and sirens and electric shocks to the chest, but with an empty room, a crisp white bed, silence.

The boss is never your friend, even if you’re sleeping with him.

Such is the demographic paradox of a junior physician’s relationship with his patients: I worry about how to extend their lives. This anxiety inevitably shortens my own.

Maybe life involves the pairing of unsuitable people, those who wait and those who keep others waiting, and the key to happiness is finding the one person with whom you share the same internal chronometer.

Never make enemies of anyone younger or healthier than you are. They write your history.

One thing led to another. That was the only way to explain how Arnold Brinkman, who considered both professional sports and young children unjustifiable, had ended up at Yankee Stadium with a nine-year-old boy.

Maybe that is the greatest of wonders: that we can be shaped so much by those we’ve known closely, and equally by those we’ve never known at all – and that we too can change...

Choose old people for enemies. They die. You win.

A century ago, people laughed at the notion that we were descended from monkeys. Today, the individuals most offended by that claim are the monkeys.

Marriage is like a series of opposing reflections, inverse images getting ever smaller like nesting dolls, each one of your trying to squeeze yourself smaller to fit inside the hopes of the other, until one...

Nixon’s offences had been so long in the past, so much part of a different era that he now seemed like some lovable but bigoted uncle you tolerated at Christmas and Thanksgiving.

Patriotism is being convinced your country is better because you were born in it.

Nothing spices up one’s sex life like having a partner.

To the bankrupt poet, to the jilted lover, to anyone who yearns to elude the doubt within and the din without, the tidal strait between Manhattan Island and her favorite suburb offers the specious illusion...

Harlem sleeps late.

I used to dream of true love; now I’m open to false, but convincing….

Life is nasty, brutish, and short. Death is easy.

The only thing more difficult than persuading someone else to start having sex with you is persuading yourself to stop.

Arnold had never given much thought to whether or not he loved America—but now it seemed pretty obvious to him that he didn’t. Not in the way Nathan Hale had loved America. Or even in...

If you give a man a hammer, he thinks he can solve all problems by pounding. Well, God gave men penises….