And when the event, the big change in your life, is simply an insight-- isn't that a strange thing? That absolutely nothing changes except that you see things differently and you're less fearful and less anxious and generally stronger as a result: isn't it amazing that a completely invisible thing in your head can feel realer than anything you've experienced before?

The personality susceptible to the dream of limitless freedom is a personality also prone, should the dream ever sour, to misanthropy and rage.

Integrity's a neutral value. Hyenas have integrity, too. They're pure hyena.

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

It was a way of recognizing places of enchantment: people falling asleep like this.

Elective ignorance was a great survival skill, perhaps the greatest.

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.