I like to feel dumb. That’s how I know there’s more in the world than me.

I don't write because there's an audience. I write because there is literature.

I am profoundly uncertain how to write. I know what I love and what I like, because it's a direct passionate response. But when I write, I'm very uncertain whether it's good enough. That is, of course, the writer's agony.

[M]ilitary metaphors have more and more come to infuse all aspects of the description of the medical situation. Disease is seen as an invasion of alien organisms, to which the body responds by its own military operations, such as the mobilizing of immunological "defenses", and medicine is "aggressive" as in the language of most chemotherapies.

I urge you to be as impudent as you dare. BE BOLD, BE BOLD, BE BOLD.

Religion is probably, after sex, the second oldest resource which human beings have available to them for blowing their minds.

Authoritarian political ideologies have a vested interest in promoting fear, a sense of the imminence of takeover by aliens and real diseases are useful material.