An ad that pretends to be art is - at absolute best - like somebody who smiles warmly at you only because he wants something from you. This is dishonest, but what's sinister is the cumulative effect that such dishonesty has on us: since it offers a perfect facsimile or simulacrum of goodwill without goodwill's real spirit, it messes with our heads and eventually starts upping our defenses even in cases of genuine smiles and real art and true goodwill. It makes us feel confused and lonely and impotent and angry and scared. It causes despair.

In this country we're unprecedentedly safe, comfortable, and well fed, with more and better venues for stimulation. And yet if you were asked, 'Is this a happy or unhappy country?' you'd check the 'unhappy' box. We're living in an era of emotional poverty, which is something that serious drug addicts feel most keenly.

No one can call themselves a writer until he or she has written at least fifty stories.

Keep in mind that a language is both a map of the world and its own world, with its own shadowlands and crevasses - places where statements that seem to obey all the language's rules are nevertheless impossible to deal with.

Do this: hate him for me after I die. I beg you. Dying request.

In reality, there is no such thing as not voting: you either vote by voting, or you vote by staying home and tacitly doubling the value of some Diehard's vote.

The great thing about irony is that it splits things apart, gets up above them so we can see the flaws and hypocrisies and duplicates.