When handsome men or beautiful women take up the work of the intellect, it impresses us because we know they could have chosen other paths to being impressive; that they chose the path of the mind suggests that there is on it something more worthwhile than a circuitous route to the good things that the good-looking get just by showing up.

Of all the unexpected things in contemporary literature, this is among the oddest: that kids have an inordinate appetite for very long, very tricky, very strange books about places that don't exist...

I think that we're always drawn - particularly sophisticated people - are always drawn to the idea of simplicity.

Big writers become a kind of shared climate.

Leafing through Forbes or Fortune [magazine]s is like reading the operating manual of a strangely sanctimonious pirate ship

Sometimes having a good time can be the outward evidence of a deep re-thinking.

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