I hate admitting that my enemies have a point.

I'm a world expert on superhero comics. I think maybe only Michael Chabon knows more than me.

Language is courage: the ability to conceive a thought, to speak it, and by doing so to make it true.

Children are the vessels into which adults pour their poison.

Books choose their authors; the act of creation is not entirely a rational and conscious one.

Our lives disconnect and reconnect, we move on, and later we may again touch one another, again bounce away. This is the felt shape of a human life, neither simply linear nor wholly disjunctive nor endlessly bifurcating, but rather this bouncey-castle sequence of bumpings-into and tumblings-apart.

In any authoritarian society, the possessor of power dictates, and if you try and step outside, he will come after you. This is equally true of Sovietism, of China and of Iran, and in our time it has happened a lot in Islam. The point is that it's worse when the authoritarianism is supported by something supernatural.