Love, like light, is a thing that is enacted better than defined: we know it afterward by the traces it leaves on paper.

I think I'm more intensely opinionated when I speak; more agreeably balanced when I write.

The special virtue of freedom is not that it makes you richer and more powerful but that it gives you more time to understand what it means to be alive.

If we are willing to act violently in pursuit of a peripheral interest, everyone can be certain that, when a vital interest is at stake, we will be still more violent. 'Credibility' is defined as the willingness to kill a lot of people now for a not very good cause to assure the world that we'll kill a lot more people if we can find a better one.

We breathe in our first language, and swim in our second.

I try to turn a written thing, when I'm in trouble with it, into a spoken thing: I start imagining what I would say to someone if I were trying to tell the story or make the argument.

Frauds master our minds; magicians, like poets and lovers, engage them in a permanent maze of possibilities.