A book can just be a description of a stick being snapped in half. If the reader is brought to feel the plight of the stick, well, you can imagine what that would be like.

Sunday was always the best of days for being the self you had intended to be, but were not, for one reason or another.

It is at the heart of our human enterprise, that is to say, at the heart of society, to allow consensus a power it ought not to have.

I want to say less, and it's easier to say less.

I begin with an image of some sort, just as if you saw something out of a window, and then went to the window to see what it was.

I don't read books for pleasure, but in desperation.

Americans are genuinely and profoundly anti-intellectual. They are especially so in their pleasure-seeking, which is epically banal.