The most purely autobiographical ­fiction requires pure invention. Nobody ever wrote a more auto­biographical story than "The Meta­morphosis".

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

Birds were like dinosaurs' better selves. They had short lives and long summers. We all should be so lucky as to leave behind such heirs.

We may freak out globally, but we suffer locally.

Today's Baudelaires are hip-hop artists.

And when the event, the big change in your life, is simply an insight-- isn't that a strange thing? That absolutely nothing changes except that you see things differently and you're less fearful and less anxious and generally stronger as a result: isn't it amazing that a completely invisible thing in your head can feel realer than anything you've experienced before?

The reader is a friend, not an adversary, not a spectator.