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

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.

It's doubtful that anyone with an internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction.

[T]hat I could find company and consolation and hope in an object pulled almost at random from a bookshelf--felt akin to an instance of religious grace.

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

Popularity has become its own justification.

But she was seventeen now and not actually dumb. She knew that you could love somebody more than anything and still not love the person all that much, if you were busy with other things.