People in New York have extremely narrow horizons. The parochialism of the center is always greater than that of the provinces. In the provinces, they keep an eye on the center, but in the center they just gaze lovingly at themselves with both eyes.
-Leon Wieseltier

I'd had all these professors from Harvard in graduate school, and they didn't want to know what I really knew, which was how to behave at a debutante party in Fort Worth. They wanted to know about cowboys. 
-Dave Hickey

It's the best depiction of a friendship that I've ever read, an 843-page expansion on a comment Dizzy Gillespie made after his friend Charlie Parker died: "He was the other half of my heartbeat."