“To the ruling class, Larry Davis is society's nightmare, a horror-film monster who keeps coming back every time you think you’ve put him away for good. But to the powerless, Davis is a resistance fighter ... ”

Until he started shooting himself in the foot with great regularity, Giuliani benefited from an elegiac media reception of a kind not seen in this town since the salad days of Thomas E. Dewey

“In America, poetic truths have real-life con­sequences, and Mailer is one of the few American intellectuals to perceive this fact as both fundamental and fundamentally good”

“Despite his penetration of the nation­al psyche, and his status as more or less the George Washington of American letters, the respect Cooper has received at home has rarely been more than grudging”

“The truth of a time and place is, of course, always illusive; but no historian can tell the story of Miami in the last decade without acknowledging one gigantic fact of municipal life: cocaine.”

“Most vampire tales I’ve read lately read like little Kinsey reports, full of tasty trivia about vam­pire life, a subject that used to be shrouded in mystery and fear, like sex. Are you ready to open the forbidden curtain?”

"Since October 1985, rock has been attacked from city halls, statehouses, fundamentalist pulpits, and the executive echelons of the FBI."

The fundamental question about the Koch administration is no longer why the mayor gave power to so many crooks, but exactly what happened years ago when whistleblowers, law enforcement investiga­tors, and private citizens first tried to warn him

“My mother is an urban peasant and I am my mother’s daughter. The city is our natural element. We each have daily adventures with bus drivers, bag ladies, ticket takers, and street crazies. Walking brings out the best in us.”