It amazes me that parents are allowed to raise kids. There's so much power and often very little accountability.

With students, one is often in the position where you have to be authoritative about what they're doing and connected to some principle. I prefer not really knowing the answer to anything interesting and I try to encourage that in teaching. If I start to feel certain about something my curiosity goes away, my mind shuts down. I'm sure that's not always true, it's stupid to generalise.

RHETORIC The art of making life less believable; the calculated use of language, not to alarm but to do full harm to our busy minds and properly dispose our listeners to a pain they have never dreamed of. The context of what can be known establishes that love and indifference are forms of language, but the wise addition of punctuation allows us to believe that there are other harms - the dash gives the reader the clear signal they are coming.

To me one of the amazing technologies of writing is the way it can listen in on thoughts. I don't feel that that's natural to other art forms in the same way.

Fiction becomes a place where I face certain fears such as losing language or losing my children.

Suspense left my life a long time ago, now it has returned. I do not care for it.

Fiction is too complicated and too elusive to break down into a set of tricks.