The key is the ability, whether innate or conditioned, to find the other side of the rote, the picayune, the meaningless, the repetitive, the pointlessly complex. To be, in a word, unborable... It is the key to modern life. If you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish.

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

No single, individual moment is in and of itself unendurable.

Words and a book and a belief that the world is words.

The job of the first eight pages is not to have the reader want to throw the book at the wall, during the first eight pages.

If your fidelity to perfectionism is too high, you never do anything.

Kafka's evocations are, rather, unconscious and almost sub-archetypal, the little-kid stuff from which myths derive; this is why we tend to call even his weirdest stories nightmarish rather than surreal.