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

For every reader who dies today, a viewer is born, and we seem to be witnessing . . . the final tipping balance.

Mr. Franzen said he and Mr. Wallace, over years of letters and conversations about the ethical role of the novelist, had come to the joint conclusion that the purpose of writing fiction was “a way out of loneliness.” (NY Times article on the memorial service of David Foster Wallace.)

I've moved away from that sort of deep-ecological extremism. I started to think: what can we do for wild birds right now? I don't want these particular species to disappear.

Here was a torture that Greek inventors of the Feast and the Stone had omitted from their Hades: the Blanket of Self-Deception. A lovely warm blanket as far as it covered the soul in torment, but it never quite covered everything.

I had a Viking sense of entitlement to whatever provisions I could plunder.

Popularity has become its own justification.