That is the paradox of the epidemic: that in order to create one contagious movement, you often have to create many small movements first.

Insight is not a lightbulb that goes off inside our heads. It is a flickering candle that can easily be snuffed out.

Sometimes constraints actually create success. Not being able to swim made me run. And running taught me the discipline I needed as a writer.

My point is that the great challenge of an artist is to balance those two things: to be strong enough to have your own personal vision that you will put on the page or the canvas or the screen, no matter what people say, but it requires a radical sensitivity. You have to be completely open to what the world is telling you, to what your audience tells you. And balancing those two things is nearly impossible.

In the act of tearing something apart, you lose its meaning.

There is nothing more common than critics of journalists accusing them of practicing journalism. It is our function in the world to take things that are complicated and render them in a form that non-experts can follow and make sense of.

There are moments, particularly in times of stress, when haste does not make waste, when our snap judgments and first impressions can offer a much better means of making sense of the world.