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

Gone. The saddest word in the language. In any language.

Whether they really believe in their brave new world, however, is ultimately beside the point. They're building it. And in the friction-free future, jacked into paradise, we'll have the 'liberty' of living (or rather, or buying the illusion of living), through the benevolent offices of a middleman as nearly omnipotent as god himself. Freedom? A more perfect captivity is difficult to imagine.

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

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

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.

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