Everyone thinks writers must know more about the inside of the human head, but that's wrong. They know less, that's why they write. Trying to find out what everyone else takes for granted.

He's lost something, some illusion I used to think was necessary to him. He's come to realize he too is human. Or is this a performance, for my benefit, to show me he's up-to-date? Maybe men shouldn't have been told about their own humanity. It's only made them uncomfortable. It's only made them trickier, slier, more evasive, harder to read.

Social media is called social media for a reason. It lends itself to sharing rather than horn-tooting.

Science is not something that exists apart from human beings. It's one of the things we do as human beings, and we always have done science and technology in some form.

If you're put on a pedestal, you're supposed to behave yourself like a pedestal type of person. Pedestals actually have a limited circumference. Not much room to move around.

I look up at the ceiling, tracing the foliage of the wreath. Today it makes me think of a hat, the large-brimmed hats women used to wear at some period during the old days: hats like enormous halos, festooned with fruit and flowers, and the feathers of exotic birds; hats like an idea of paradise, floating just above the head, a thought solidified.

It's a critical fallacy of our times ... that a writer should 'grow,' 'change,' or 'develop.' This fallacy causes us to expect from children or radishes: 'grow,' or there's something wrong with you. But writers are not radishes. If you look at what most writers actually do, it resembles a theme with variations more than it does the popular notion of growth.