Maybe that, really, is as good a definition as any of an artist in the world: a ruthless person.

If you’re reading to find friends, you’re in deep trouble.

If I had to summarize, most broadly, my concerns as a writer, I'd say the question 'How then must we live?' is at the heart of it, for me.

I was funny -- ha-ha, not peculiar. It was a modest currency, like pennies: pedestrian, somewhat laborious, but a currency nonetheless. I was funny, in public, most often at my own expense.

We read to find life, in all its possibilities.

As my wise friend Didi has more than once observed about life's passages, every departure entails an arrival elsewhere, every arrival implies a departure from afar.

But we're lost in a world of appearances now.