He made me think of all the books I hadn't read, and all the ones I'd read but hadn't fully understood.

I was a garbage man in New Jersey in summers during college at Yale. Everybody else got to go to Switzerland and I got to go to the dump.

From a distance, it makes perfect sense that the people and the things you think will save you are the very ones that have the power to disappoint you most bitterly, but up close it can hit you as a bewildering surprise.

It just so happened that for most of my life I've lived in the suburbs.

I think I'm fascinated by the power of religion in our culture. Like a lot of secular, liberal people, I ignored it for a long time. Lately, of course, just from a political perspective, it's impossible to ignore.

When things don't go well, it helps to think of yourself as a genius and the rest of the world as a bunch of idiots.

I've been a little bit obsessed with religion, without being a religious person, for about a decade.