My heart goes out to him. Sort of. Because empathy depends on how you've spent your day.

I started out in engineering. I was a geophysical engineer. Throughout the course of my life I've done a lot of strange jobs, and the effect has been to make me think a little more skeptically about our capitalist society.

Maybe you could even think 100,000 people are inside each human being. And you drop a novel on that person, and a certain number of those sub-people come alive or get reenergized for some finite time.

In my case, when I am trying to be "kind" I often default in a sort of toothless loving-all stance that is, actually, not kind, because it is not truthful.

Chekhov - shall I be blunt? - is the greatest short story writer who ever lived.

America, to me, should be shouting all the time, a bunch of shouting voices, most of them wrong, some of them nuts, but please, not just one droning glamourous reasonable voice.

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