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

My personal belief is that because technology and economic logic has gotten so sophisticated, cruelties can be perpetrated now that would have been unimaginable two or three hundred years ago.

One paradox of professional writing is that books written solely for money and/or acclaim will almost never be good enough to garner either.

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

Good writing isn’t a science. It’s an art, and the horizon is infinite. You can always get better.

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.

I was never the sort of child who believed in "monsters under the bed" or vampires, or who needed a night-light in his bedroom; on the contrary, my father...once laughingly told my mother that he thought I might suffer from a type of benign psychosis called "antiparanoia," in which I seemed to believe that I was the object of an intricate universal conspiracy to make me so happy I could hardly stand it.