Part of the transaction between writer and reader is the pleasure of building a community and encouraging people to play along.

All I can ask from society is that it please stop telling me why I should like sports.

Terry Gross. I would rush home from high school to listen to Terry Gross.

I say, if you're going to eat a creature alive, you have to expect some screaming. That is the carnivore's burden.

This is one of the defining sorrows of books: that we cannot see one another.

The reality is that there is an enormous value to gut-check instinctive decision-making in the world that is not hampered by reams and reams of research and complexity.

This is something that the nimblest standup comedians learn, over time, to handle gracefully. They'll go between prepared material, then they'll respond to what's happening in the room and weave it back into the prepared material and so on.