We are silent, considering shortfalls. There's not much time left, for us to become what we once intended. Jon had potential, but it's not a word tha….

The myth that everyone once read great literature is just a myth..

As with all knowledge, once you knew it, you couldn't imagine how it was that you hadn't known it before..

Optimism means better than reality; pessimism means worse than reality. I'm a realist..

I am not running for mayor yet. But if it comes to be true that people cannot voice an opinion unless they have been elected, then we are no longer i….

I did ... learn an important distinction in graduate school: a speculation about who had syphilis when is gossip if it's about your friends, a plot e….

Even in the tragedies, Shakespeare always put in parts for the comic actors because his audience was mixed. He puts in people who talk like aristocra….

I tried for the longest time to find out what deconstructionism was. Nobody was able to explain it to me clearly. The best answer I got was from a wr….

It used to be that your bloodlines dictated who you were. But the U.S. became the land of the self-made man, in which not only did you make a fortune….

These things you did were like prayers; you did them and you hoped they would save you. And for the most part they did. Or something did; you could t….

Writing... is an act of faith: I believe it's also an act of hope, the hope that things can get better than they are..

Despite their cool poses they wear their cravings on the outside, like the suckers on a squid. They want it all..

When we think of the past it's the beautiful things we pick out. We want to believe it was all like that..

There's more private security in the United States than there are publicly funded forces, like police. What you don't want is a meld of government an….

Communications technology changes possibilities for communication, but that doesn't mean it changes the inherited structure of the brain. So you may ….

For years I wanted to be older, and now I am..

If it's all instruction, you get annoyed with it and bored, and you stop reading. If it's all entertainment, you read it quite quickly, your heart go….

It isn't chic for women to be drunk. Men drunks are more excusable, more easily absolved, but why? It must be thought they have better reasons..

What is the real breath of a man — the breathing out or the breathing in?.

Freedom, like everything else, is relative..

It's a critical fallacy of our times ... that a writer should 'grow,' 'change,' or 'develop.' This fallacy causes us to expect from children or radis….