I read to make myself feel awake.

Don't be afraid to be confused. Try to remain permanently confused. Anything is possible.

The other thing that's useful for me is this notion of the absolute versus the relative:if we walk out and it's a beautiful morning, it's only a beautiful morning because we don't have a broken leg or hemorrhoids or something.

As one gets older, this question of death, becomes more vexing and urgent.

Nostalgia is, 'Hey, remember the other mall that used to be there?'

Sometimes I just turn on the TV and I'm like, wait a minute, that guy [Donald Trump]? It's incredible that he did all those things and he still won. It's hard to process.

This - where we are now - is where a culture gets to, when it has chosen, for many years, banality over intelligence, the literal over the immaterial or complex, materialism over spirituality. This is the result of many years of disrespecting the intellectual project - of a collective acceptance of the idea that thinking and reasoning and reading deeply in difficult text and being respectful of history are somehow "wimpy" or secondary.