The Mekons were kind of like the background music of my life.

I was a late child from my parents, so I grew up surrounded by people a lot older than me. I think even when I was 21, I felt like I was a 70-year-old man.

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.

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

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.

Fiction is a particularly effective way for strangers to connect across time and distance

If multiculturalism succeeds in making us a nation of independently empowered tribes, each tribe will be deprived of the comfort of victimhood and be forced to confront human limitation for what it is: a fixture of life.