Kissing Mother Superior, incompetent, hairball, poppy seeds, on the can.

We lie. That's what we do. You're selling me a line of bullshit and you want me to sell you a line of bullshit back so you can write a major line of bullshit and be paid for it.

I wonder what Proust would have made of our present-day locus of collective fantasy, the Internet. I’m guessing he would have seized on its wistful aspect, pointing out gently and with wry humor that much of what beguiles us is the act of reaching for what isn’t there.

Technology makes everyone feel old. A laptop is old after two years. Someone always has something newer. Everyone seems to feel obsolete now, even the young.

That adage about 'Write what you know' is basically the opposite of the way I function. I write about what I'm curious to find out.

[I]t may be that a crowd at a particular moment of history creates the object to justify its gathering.

What he needed was to find fifty more people like him, who had stopped being themselves without realizing it.