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

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

The human species was given dominion over the earth and took the opportunity to exterminate other species and warm the atmosphere and generally ruin things in its own image, but it paid this price for its privileges: that the finite and specific animal body of this species contained a brain capable of conceiving the infinite and wishing to be infinite itself.

Once there are good sentences on the page, I can feel a loyalty to them and start following their logic, and take refuge from myself.

Reading enables me to maintain a sense of something substantive– my ethical integrity, my intellectual integrity.

It's not surprising to see in my own work, looking back, and in the work of some of my peers, an attention to family. It's nice to write a book that does tend toward significance and meaning, and where else are you sure of finding it?

Nice people don't necessarily fall in love with nice people.