Seriously, the world is changing so quickly that if you had any more than 80 years of change I don't see how you could stand it psychologically.

Without privacy there was no point in being an individual.

I hate that word dysfunction.

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.

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

The place of stillness that you have to go to to write, but also to read seriously, is the point where you can actually make responsible decisions, where you can actually engage productively with an otherwise scary and unmanageable world.

Love is about bottomless empathy, born out of the heart’s revelation that another person is every bit as real as you are. And this is why love, as I understand it, is always specific. Trying to love all of humanity may be a worthy endeavor, but, in a funny way, it keeps the focus on the self, on the self’s own moral or spiritual well-being. Whereas, to love a specific person, and to identify with his or her struggles and joys as if they were your own, you have to surrender some of your self.