Living on a planet of fixed size requires compromise, and while we are the only party capable of negotiating, we are not the only party at the table. We've never claimed more, and we've never had less.

The hardest part of writing is not to get the ideas but to remember, why it is important to get them.

What were we spending so much time doing if not getting to know each other?

But when, at the end of my sophomore year, I became a philosophy major and started doing my first seriously pretentious thinking, I became a vegetarian again. The kind of willful forgetting that I was sure meat eating required felt too paradoxical to the intellectual life I was trying to shape. I thought life could, should, and must conform to the mold of reason. You can imagine how annoying this made me.

Art can be very political but that can't be the purpose of art, it can't be the driving force. It isn't with any of the books that I love, anyway.

I'm deeply curious about Jewish things. I've toyed around with the idea of going to rabbinical school.

Everything else happened - why not the things that could have?