Just how destructive does a culinary preference have to be before we decide to eat something else? If contributing to the suffering of billions of animals that live miserable lives and (quite often) die in horrific ways isn't motivating, what would be? If being the number one contributor to the most serious threat facing the planet (global warming) isn't enough, what is? And if you are tempted to put off these questions of conscience, to say not now, then when?

They learned to hate her unknowability, her untouchability, the collage of her.

Books are for those without real lives, he thought. And they are no real replacement.

Writing's funny, it's like walking down a hall in the dark looking for the light switch, and suddenly you find it, flip it on, and then you discover the hallway you passed through is papered with the novel you've written.

People around the world were moving from one place to another. No one was staying.

Memory was supposed to fill the time, but it made time a hole to be filled.

I do think ordinariness is, in a way, the enemy, but not ordinariness as the opposite of flamboyance.