There is no hatred in my love for you. Only a sadness I feel all the more strongly for my inability to explain or describe it.

The assumption that you everyone else is like you. That you are the world. The disease of consumer capitalism. The complacent solipsism.

I think the only thing for me, the tricky thing with the footnotes, is that they are an irritant, and they require a little extra work, and so they either have to be really germane or they have to be kind of fun to read.

Talent is its own expectation, Jim: you either live up to it or it waves a hankie, receding forever.

Dostoevsky wrote fiction about identity, moral value, death, will, sexual vs. spiritual love, greed, freedom, obsession, reason, faith, suicide. And he did it without ever reducing his characters to mouthpieces or his books to tracts. His concern was always what it is to be a human being—that is, how to be an actual *person*, someone whose life is informed by values and principles, instead of just an especially shrewd kind of self-preserving animal.

My worst character flaw that I'm conscious of is that I tend to think my way into circles instead of resolving anything. It's paralyzing and boring for people around me.

Stay conscious and alive, day in and day out.