You should see it. V for Vendetta I mean. "I'll look it up." No. With Me. At my house. Now

We have this weird thing in the world where you don't get insulted for what you do, you get insulted for who you are.

Neither novels or their readers benefit from any attempts to divine whether any facts hide inside a story. Such efforts attack the very idea that made-up stories can matter, which is sort of the foundational assumption of our species.

That feeling of finishedness does not come all at once, and it is not easily won, but I think once you get there it is hard to go back.

Even if it’s a dumb story, telling it changes people just the slightest little bit, just as living the story changes me. An infinitesimal change. And that infinetisimal change ripples outward —ever smaller but everlasting. I will get forgotten, but the stories will last. And so we all matter —maybe less than a lot, but always more than none.

That's why those tapes we made are going to be so great one day, because they'll tell stories that time has swallowed up or distorted or whatever.

Failing to grapple with complexity actually turns out to be a pretty bad life strategy.