I'll never stop caring. But the thing about caring is, it's inconvenient. Sometimes you've got to give when it makes no sense to at all. Sometimes you've got to give until it hurts.

I usually write in my underwear, with a space heater running full blast, and three dogs sleeping at me feet.

If I walk into a place, a party, say, and there's a bookshelf, I immediately gravitate toward it. Unless there's a bar. But even then, it's only a matter of a few rounds before I make my way to the bookshelf. If there are good books on it, I may never leave the spot all night. Anybody I really want to talk to is going to make his or her way to that bookshelf sooner or later, anyway, right? Books are a nexus. They start conversations, and they continue conversations, and they make people better conversationalists. I have not found this to be the case with Iron Chef, or even alcohol.

It's not easy getting old, you know. Things become a lot less clear.

I discovered John Fante when I was 17 years old - strangely, not through Charles Bukowski, but through William Saroyan, who was his drinking buddy.

Can we really be whoever we want to be, now that we’ve collected all that we are?

The Mathematician's Shiva is a brilliant and compelling family saga full of warmth, pathos, history, and humor, not to mention a cast of delightfully quirky characters, and a math lesson or two; all together, a winning equation! When Rojstaczer writes about mathematics, you'd think he was writing about poetry.