If anyone is tweeting right now, I'm not pulling a knife on David Cronenberg!

I hold to the idea that civility, understood as the willingness to engage in public discourse, is the first virtue of citizens.

Books, like lives, are always unfinished even when they end, for to write is to struggle with contingency, to impose a certain false order upon the endless, and endlessly frustrating, nature of thought.

For every apparent gain, in short, we now observe a balancing danger. This is the world we have created.

War is smaller in scale than in recent memory, but it is far more ambiguous, intractable, and nasty. Money flows more quickly than ever, but it is still somehow manages to gather and puddle in certain places, for certain people rather then others.

Paradoxically, the problems of politics often arise not in the form of a problem of scarcity, but as one of abundance.

Friendship requires a leap, not of faith but of regard.