Gossip is the currency of the discourse, so you should shut up about yourself. Never confess, never explain, never apologize, and never complain.

My mother was an economics professor. I'm proficient in math, and statistics, game theory, symbolic logic and all of that.

When you really respect somebody who does something different from you, your respect is for the quality of the job.

The idea of political content is irrelevant. Content is irrelevant. I always tell my students, "Never forget you're writing words! You know, word one, word two, word three, word four. The words have to be organized. Nothing else does."

It used to be that if you stood in front of a painting you didn't understand, you'd have some obligation to guess. Now you don't.

I think that if you don't like something and it's not easy, you shouldn't be doing it.

Art and writing come from somewhere down around the lizard brain. It's a much more peculiar activity than we like to think it is. The problems arise when we try to domesticate the practice, to pretend that it's a normal human activity and that "everybody's creative." They're not.