Literature deserves its prestige for one reason above all others - because it's a tool to help us live and die with a little bit more wisdom, goodness, and sanity.

We need a home in the psychological sense as much as we need one in the physical: to compensate for a vulnerability. We need a refuge to shore up our states of mind, because so much of the world is opposed to our allegiances. We need our rooms to align us to desirable versions of ourselves and to keep alive the important, evanescent sides of us.

Being funny should be an incidental byproduct of trying to get to something truthful, not a destination in itself.

Politics is so difficult, it's generally only people who aren't quite up to the task who feel convinced they are.

Good books put a finger on emotions that are deeply our own - but that we could never have described on our own.

We each appear to hold within ourselves a range of divergent views as to our native qualities.. And amid such uncertainty, we typically turn to the wider world to settle the question of our significance.. we seem beholden to affections of others to endure ourselves.

The good parent: someone who doesn't mind, for a time, being hated by their children.