There are books that I read years ago that enlivened things in me that haven't died yet.

I have this tendency to take a little bit of questionable knowledge and riff on it.

I feel nervous because I revere [Zadie Smith] so much. I don't want to be stupid. If I say something stupid, just interrupt me.

I don't feel like I have the intelligence to really inhabit a consistently high level of prose.

All along, my mantra was: Don't write unless it contributes to the emotion, and do anything you do in service of the emotion only.

I think that's one of the maybe under-discussed aspects of process - the difference between a good writing day and a bad one is the quality of the split-second decisions you made.

I came away believing and really deeply troubled by is the extent to which you can have two well-intentioned people talking in a friendly spirit and you get to a point where the two mutual mythologies just don't intersect. So kind of the next piece I'd like to write or think about is how did this left-right divide get so weird and codified.