I suppose all writers worry about the well running dry.

There are a great many sins in this world, none of them original.

If my career continues along its current arc, people will probably look at me and see a writer who is obsessed with the relationship between rich and poor and with how the rich somehow or other always manage to betray the poor, even when they don't mean to.

What if all everybody needed in the world was to be sure of one friend? What if you were the one, and you refused to say those simple words?

That afternoon I came to understand that one of the deepest purposes of intellectual sophistication is to provide distance between us and our most disturbing personal truths and gnawing fears.

Who but an English professor would threaten to kill a duck a day and hold up a goose as an example?

They stayed, many of them, because staying was easier and less scary than leaving.