It's healthy to say uncle when your bone's about to break.

Twitter is unspeakably irritating. Twitter stands for everything I oppose.

Fiction, I believed, was the transmutation of experiential dross into linguistic gold. Fiction meant taking up whatever the world had abandoned by the road and making something beautiful out of it.

This wasn't the person he'd thought he was, or would have chosen to be if he'd been free to choose, but there was something comforting and liberating about being an actual definite someone, rather than a collection of contradictory potential someones.

Nell Zink is a writer of extraordinary talent and range. Her work insistently raises the possibility that the world is larger and stranger than the world you think you know.

But the first lesson reading teaches is how to be alone.

To me, the point of a novel is to take you to a still place. You can multitask with a lot of things, but you can’t really multitask reading a book.