It amazes me that parents are allowed to raise kids. There's so much power and often very little accountability..

Teaching is all armchair. I learn about writing by writing and thinking about what I've written and throwing it away..

Without sound, celebration and grief look nearly the same..

I'm attracted to how fraught the parent-child relationship is, swerving so easily between love and hostility, with almost no plausible way to end, un….

In some sense, prose fiction is just a way of unlocking a space. If I can unlock the space, it comes out and it's vivid, I find that I care about it,….

I'm interested in the hope we invest in science, and the disappointment we can feel when science flattens, or 'explains,' the larger mysteries of rel….

In certain strains of Judaism, there's a profound passion for the ineffable. Contemplation of God is meant to be forever elusive, because, you know, ….

Rain is used as white noise when God is disgusted by too much prayer, when the sky is stuffed to bursting with the noise of what people need..

To refrain from storytelling is perhaps one of the highest forms of respect we can pay. Those people, with no stories to circle them, can die without….

Mostly we're motivated to control ourselves in public. Mostly. At home the motivation is much less clear. At home there's a bit of a lab for bad beha….

Judaism to me, as badly as I practiced it, what I've always loved about it was its total embrace of complexity, its admission of unknowability..

Among other things, autoimmune disorders are an induction into a world of unstable information and no reliable expertise..

A misspelled word is probably an alias for some desperate call for aid, which is bound to fail..

My first book, 'The Age of Wire and String,' came out in 1995, and it was hardly reviewed at all..

It's lonely to listen to the pleasure of others, not that I've made a habit of that kind of eavesdropping. There's joy and passion in the next room, ….

Spelling is a way to make words safe, at least for now, until another technology appears to soften attacks launched from the mouth..

Suspense left my life a long time ago, now it has returned. I do not care for it..

People are considered as areas that resist light, mistakes in the air, collision sweet spots. At the time of this writing, the whole world is a crime….

Slamming the book shut produces a wind on the face, a weather that is copyrighted by the author, and this wind may not be deployed without permission….

Machineries of reason, machineries of conduct, machineries of virtue. The machine that regulates instinct, keeps one’s hands free of another man’s th….

To me one of the amazing technologies of writing is the way it can listen in on thoughts. I don't feel that that's natural to other art forms in the ….