I don't miss the obligation to be opinionated, but I do regret the chance to share a joy.

Big writers become a kind of shared climate.

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

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.

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.

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

Often the block [in writing] comes from the wall of words that keep out the simplicity of sense.