...the sun would leave my sky if I couldn't assume you'd simply come and tell me you were sad.

Fiction is one of the few experiences where loneliness can be both confronted and relieved.

God seems to have a kind of laid-back management style I’m not crazy about.

Mary had a little lamb, its fleece electrostatic / And everywhere Mary went, the lights became erratic.

No wonder we cannot appreciate the really central Kafka joke: that the horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from the horrific struggle. That our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home.

In the broadest possible sense, writing well means to communicate clearly and interestingly and in a way that feels alive to the reader. Where there’s some kind of relationship between the writer and the reader - even though it’s mediated by a kind of text - there’s an electricity about it.

It's like a fugue of evaded responsibility.