Everybody who tells you how to act has whiskey on their breath.

An old essay by John Updike begins, 'We live in an era of gratuitous inventions and negative improvements.' That language is general and abstract, near the top of the ladder. It provokes our thinking, but what concrete evidence leads Updike to his conclusion ? The answer is in his second sentence : 'Consider the beer can.' To be even more specific, Updike was complaining that the invention of the pop-top ruined the aesthetic experience of drinking beer. 'Pop-top' and 'beer' are at the bottom of the ladder, 'aesthetic experience' at the top.

One of the cool, chaste countries - Canada or Sweden.

America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy.

Faith is not so much a binary pole as a quantum state, which tends to indeterminacy when closely examined.

The refusal to rest content, the willingness to risk excess on behalf of one's obsessions, is what distinguishes artists from entertainers, and what makes some artists adventurers on behalf of us all.

That's the trouble with caring about anybody, you begin to feel overprotective. Then you begin to feel crowded.