The basic idea that the purpose of life is to be happy or is to experience the most favorable ratio of pleasure to suffering or productivity to work or gratification to sacrifice or any of that stuff, which, you know, a couple generations ago, to say that kind of stuff would have made you, you know, a freak - a freak and an Epicurean - and now seems to be so much - simply an unquestioned assumption of the culture that we don't really even talk about it anymore.

The severing of an established connection is exponentially more painful than the rejection of an attempted connection.

In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.

Talent is its own expectation, Jim: you either live up to it or it waves a hankie, receding forever.

I was trained mainly as a short story writer and that's how I started writing, but I've also become very interested in non-fiction, just because I got a couple of magazine jobs when I was really poor and needed the money and it turned out that non-fiction was much more interesting than I thought it was.

I had, by thirteen, developed a sort of Taoist hubris about my ability to control via non-control.

Mediocrity is contextual.