Equality has always been extant but some of us just didn't know it.

If you could press a button and your ego investment was less, the toothache would be less. Or less tragic at least.

It was that impossible thing: happiness that does not wilt to reveal the thin shoots of some new desire rising from within it.

Goodbye. I am leaving because I am bored.

Err in the direction of kindness.

As a writer I'm essentially just trying to impersonate a first-time reader, who picks up the story and has to decide, at every point, whether to keep going.

I might take from the current political chaos a desire to somehow reflect its essential qualities in a story - the blatant lies that get accepted with repetition; the way mass media seems to be agitating people en masse; the way, particularly, that a relatively lucky and affluent and privileged population can be undone by a certain spoiled quality; that feeling when two decent people violently disagree, because they are arguing from two non-intersecting data sets - well, the list goes on.