Cooking is 80 percent confidence, a skill best acquired starting from when the apron strings wrap around you twice.

Will you explain to me why people encourage delusional behaviour in children, and medicate it in adults?

I'm widest awake as a writer doing something new, engaged in a process I'm not sure I can finish, generating at the edge of my powers. Some people bungee jump; I write.

You can curse the dead or pray for them, but don't expect them to do a thing for you. They're far too interested in watching us, to see what in heaven's name we will do next.

the conspicuous consumption of limited resources has yet to be accepted widely as a spiritual error, or even bad manners

Silence has many advantages. When you do not speak, other people presume you to be deaf or feeble-minded and promptly make a show of their own limitations.

The standard approach has been to pump up the dosage of chemicals ... Twenty percent of these approved-for-use pesticides are listed by the EPA as carcinogenic in humans.