If you're not spending every waking moment of your day radically rethinking the nature of the world-if you're not plotting every moment boiling the carcass of the old order-then you're wasting your day.

The only way to the top is killing and greed. Okay, I'm kidding. But killing helps.

Besides, animals don’t even have time. Only humans have time. It’s what makes us different.

...we're told by TV and Reader's Digest that a crisis will trigger massive personal change--and that those big changes will make the pain worthwhile. But from what he could see, big change almost never happens. People simply feel lost. They have no idea what to say or do or feel or think. they become messes and tend to remain messes.

Letting go of randomness is one of the hardest decisions a person can make.

I kind of wonder if creativity is all morphing into one big thing that's not even art, but something universal and bigger.

In the old days people had far fewer channels in which to place their imaginative time. There's definitely more competition for time . . . and yet people seem to be reading [books] as much.