Our attachments are our temple, what we worship, no? What we give ourselves to, what we invest with faith. . . . Attachments are of great seriousness. Choose your attachments carefully. Choose your temple of fanaticism with great care.

The point here is ... to be just a little less arrogant. To have just a little critical awareness about myself and my certainties. Because a huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded.

It seems important to find ways of reminding ourselves that most "familiarity" is meditated and delusive.

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

I am concentrating docilely on the question why U.S. restrooms always appear to us as infirmaries for public distress, the place to reagain control.

I often think I can see it in myself and in other young writers, this desperate desire to please coupled with a kind of hostility to the reader.

Learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot or will not exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed.