The standard personality type for a writer is a shy megalomaniac.

You heard people say forty was the new thirty and fifty was the new forty and sixty was the new forty-five, but you never heard anybody say eighty was the new anything. Eighty was just eighty.

It can be a way of knowledge, a path, an inspiration, a Tao, an ordering, a memory, a fantasy, a seduction, a prayer, a summoning, an incantation murmured under the breath as the torchlights sink lower and the forest looms taller and the wolves howl louder and the fire prepares for its submission to the encroaching dark.

It's as if people used the invention of seat belts as an opportunity to take up drunk driving.

The financial system in its current condition poses an existential threat to Western democracy far exceeding any terrorist threat.

Sometimes, the only way of doing something is to do it.

The City is, in terms of its basic functioning, a far-off country of which we know little.