budget
I was expert at the kind of hallucinatory economics that turned every snake into a ladder—whenever I dined in a fairly expensive restaurant, for instance, I calculated that I’d saved money by not dining in a very expensive one, and the money saved I tacked on to my inner bank account, as if it were money earned. Thus I became richer every time I ate out at my own expense, and twice as much richer when I ate out at someone else’s expense.
The Smoking Diaries (New York: Da Capo Press, 2005), 204.
Budgets are moral documents.
Interview with Brian Lehrer, Cooper Union, New York City, April 27, 2011.
Hope is not a budgeting strategy.
“Hope is Not a Budgeting Strategy,” Bucks Blog, The New York Times, November 1, 2010.