I'm very bright, but I'm terrified of sounding like someone who thinks he's very bright-because those people are assholes.

Progressive liberals seem incapable of stating the obvious truth: that we who are well off should be willing to share more of what we have with poor people not for the poor people's sake but for our own; i.e., we should share what we have in order to become less narrow and frightened and lonely and self-centered people.

No wonder we cannot appreciate the really central Kafka joke: that the horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from the horrific struggle. That our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home.

This is so American, man: either make something your God and cosmos and then worship it, or else kill it.

I just think that fiction that isn't exploring what it means to be human today isn't art.

The greatest sin is appearing naive or old-fashioned so that somebody can give you a sort of a very cool arch smile and devastate you with one extraordinarily crafted line that puts kind of a hole in your pretentious balloon.

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