One of the things that makes Wittgenstein a real artist to me is that he realized that no conclusion could be more horrible than solipsism.

Psychotics, say what you want about them, tend to make the first move.

Great short stories and great jokes have a lot in common. Both depend on what communication-theorists sometimes called "exformation," which is a certain quantity of vital information removed from but evoked by a communication in such a way as to cause a kind of explosion of associative connections within the recipient.

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 assumption that you everyone else is like you. That you are the world. The disease of consumer capitalism. The complacent solipsism.

True heroism is minutes, hours, weeks, year upon year of the quiet, precise, judicious exercise of probity and care—with no one there to see or cheer. This is the world.

I am not what you see and hear.