The entire ball game, in terms of both the exam and life, was what you gave attention to vs. what you willed yourself to not.

...the most obvious, ubiquitous, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about.

Worship your body, beauty, and sexual allure and you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you.

Progressive liberals seem incapable of stating the obvious truth: that we who are well off should be willing to share more of what we have with poor people not for the poor people's sake but for our own; i.e., we should share what we have in order to become less narrow and frightened and lonely and self-centered people.

This might be one way to start talking about differences between the early postmodern writers of the fifties and sixties and their contemporary descendants.

The new rebels might be artists willing to risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs, the parody of gifted ironists, the ‘Oh how banal.’

Look, man, we'd probably most of us agree that these are dark times, and stupid ones, but do we need fiction that does nothing but dramatize how dark and stupid everything is?