Tim O'Brien's book about Vietnam, The Things They Carried, has won every award, is studied in college and is considered to be definitive. But it's fiction.

We are all feeding from each other, all the time, every day.

I'm never a fan of the sociopathic kind of reviewing, people who are sort of self-immolating and have social problems or whatever, and let it out in literary-criticism form. I just feel like book reviewing should be respectful and calm and not filled with bile.

My head was a condemned church with a ceiling of bats, but I swung from this dark mood to euphoria when I thought about leaving.

Because I grew up with this naive expectation of people doing right, I get shocked by every little violation.

How had this happened? Everyone in the world knew more than us, about everything, and this I hated then found hugely comforting.

Every time my brain parks the car neatly in the driveway, my mouth drives through the back of the garage.