Ambition, if it feeds at all, does so on the ambition of others.

I don't write easily or rapidly. My first draft usually has only a few elements worth keeping. I have to find what those are and build from them and throw out what doesn't work, or what simply is not alive.

[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.

Kindness, kindness, kindness. I want to make a New Year's prayer, not a resolution. I'm praying for courage.

The young-old polarization and the male-female polarization are perhaps the two leading stereotypes that imprison people.

Tragedy is a vision of nihilism, a heroic or ennobling vision of nihilism.

Someone who is perennially surprised that depravity exists, who continues to feel disillusioned (even incredulous) when confronted with evidence of what humans are capable of inflicting in the way of gruesome, hands-on cruelties upon other humans, has not reached moral or psychological adulthood.