Kafka didn't save me. He just told me I was drowning.

The 'deep' civic function of the humanities . . . is something understood very well by totalitarian societies, which tend to keep close tabs on them, and to circumscribe them in direct proportion to how stringently the population is controlled.

It’s a race between your foolishness and your allotted days. Good luck.

I distrust the perpetually busy; always have. The frenetic ones spinning in tight little circles like poisoned rats. The slower ones, grinding away their fourscore and ten in righteousness and pain. They are the soul-eaters.

Life isn't simple. Literature shouldn't be either.

Every step you take, a million doors open in front of you like poppies; your next step closes them, and another million bloom. You get on a train, you pick up a lamp, you speak, you don’t. What decides why one thing gets picked to be the way it will be? Accident? Fate? Some weakness in ourselves? Forget your harps, your tin-foil angels—the only heaven worth having would be the heaven of answers.

Consider it: Who but God could have dreamed a tale so absurd and so heartless?