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

I feel that working environmentalists are, in the main, happier than armchair environmentalists.

Deploring other people--their lack of perfection--had always been our sport.

I don't personally like the e-readers they've come up with so far. I don't fetishize books, but I do like that they're solid and unchanging.

Depression presents itself as a realism regarding the rottenness of the world in general and the rottenness of your life in particular. But the realism is merely a mask for depression's actual essence, which is an overwhelming estrangement from humanity. The more persuaded you are of your unique access to the rottenness, the more afraid you become of engaging with the world; and the less you engage with the world, the more perfidiously happy-faced the rest of humanity seems for continuing to engage with it.

Fiction is a solution, the best solution, to the problem of existential solitude.

I find it a huge strain to be responsible for my tastes and be known and defined by them.