We are a society dying, said Aunt Lydia, of too much choice.

Walking along past the store windows, into which she peers with her usual eagerness, her usual sense that maybe, today, she will discover behind them something that will truly be worth seeing, she feels as if her feet are not on cement at all but on ice. The blade of the skate floats, she knows, on a thin film of water, which it melts by pressure and which freezes behind it. This is the freedom of the present tense, this sliding edge.

His father was self-made, but his mother was constructed by others, and such edifices are notoriously fragile.

I could end this with a moral, as if this were a fable about animals, though no fables are really about animals.

Craziness was considered funny, like all other things that were in reality frightening and profoundly shameful.

I hate to break this to you: One of these days I'm going to die. I expect that when I croak I'll no longer be using Twitter, unless I can do it from the grave.

I'm a novelist, and idle speculation is what novelists do. How odd to spend one's life trying to pretend that non-existent people are real: though no odder, I suppose, than what government bureaucrats do, which is trying to pretend that real people are non-existent.