Very early you come to the realization that nothing will ever take you away from yourself.

What I know is, you have chance in life--of surviving it--if you tolerate loss well; manage not to be a cynic through it all; to subordinate, as Ruskin implied, to keep proportion, to connect the unequal things into a whole that preserves the good, even if admittedly good is often not simple to find.

You can't always go to the well and have things be funny.

I'm dyslexic. If you can reconcile yourself to not being able to burn through books, which you shouldn't any way, you can slow the whole process down. Then, because of my disability, there is more for me in imaginative literature than there is for other people.

I didn't read a serious book until I was 19.

There are more people in America that love guns and want guns for themselves and everyone else than there are not. It is also true that liberals who don't want guns are puny by and large. They're not risking anything, all they're doing is saying they don't like something. Liberals are quick to say this should happen and this should not happen, but they don't do anything about it much.

Something will be there when the flood recedes. We know that. It will be those people now standing in the water, and on those rooftops - many black, many poor. Homeless. Overlooked. And it will be New Orleans - though its memory may be shortened, its self-gaze and eccentricity scoured out so that what's left is a city more like other cities, less insular, less self-regarding, but possibly more self-knowing after today. A city on firmer ground.