it is always difficult to impress the ignorant.

So many stories are determined before they start.

You were always uncomfortable with the rhetoric of emotion, which is quite a different matter from discomfort with emotion itself.

The pediatrician must have thought me one of those neurotic mothers who craved distinction for her child but who in our civilization's latter-day degeneracy could only conceive of the exceptional in terms of deficiency or affliction.

We are not attracted to people because they are virtuous. In fact, there's something a little creepy about people who are too good. There is a big draw to people who are successful at breaking the rules. That means we end up admiring a lot of people that we think we shouldn't.

In a country that doesn't discriminate between fame and infamy, the latter presents itself as plainly more achievable.

I am vain, or once was, and one of my vanities was to feign that I was not.