[T]o really try to be informed and literate today is to feel stupid nearly all the time, and to need help.

We are not dead but asleep, dreaming of ourselves.

We're not keen on the idea of the story sharing its valence with the reader. But the reader's own life "outside" the story changes the story.

Many people in America throw the term "fascism" around, particularly for Middle-Eastern terrorists, but in fact what fascism really is is a close alliance between a unitary executive and a state and large corporations and a state.

Most of us will still take nihilism over neanderthalism.

The lives of most people are small tight pallid and sad, more to be mourned than their deaths. We starve at the banquet: We cannot see that there is a banquet because seeing the banquet requires that we see also ourselves sitting there starving-seeing ourselves clearly, even for a moment, is shattering. We are not dead but asleep, dreaming of ourselves.

Mediocrity is contextual.