Kafka's evocations are, rather, unconscious and almost sub-archetypal, the little-kid stuff from which myths derive; this is why we tend to call even his weirdest stories nightmarish rather than surreal.

It can become an exercise in trying to get the reader to like and admire you instead of an exercise in creative art.

I received 500,000 discrete bits of information today, of which maybe 25 are important. My job is to make some sense of it.

This is not a matter of virtue-it's a matter of my choosing to do the work of somehow altering or getting free of my natural, hard-wired default-setting, which is to be deeply and literally self-centered, and to see and interpret everything through this lens of self.

Lucky people develop a relationship with a certain kind of art that becomes spiritual, almost religious, and doesn’t mean, you know, church stuff, but it means you’re just never the same.

[I]f the writer does his job right, what he basically does is remind the reader of how smart the reader is.

Fiction, poetry, music...these are the places (for me) where loneliness is countenanced, stared down, transfigured, treated.