My entire career, in fiction or nonfiction, I have reported and written about people who are not like me.

It is very comforting to believe that leaders who do terrible things are, in fact, mad. That way, all we have to do is make sure we don't put psychotics in high places and we've got the problem solved.

Dear Mother, I meant to write you before this and I hope you haven't been worried.... I have met some Beautiful People and...

[Aldous Huxley] compared the brain to a 'reducing valve'. In ordinary perception, the senses send an overwhelming flood of information to the brain, which the brain then filters down to a trickle it can manage for the purpose of survival in a highly competitive world. Man has become so rational, so utilitarian, that the trickle becomes most pale and thin. It is efficient, for mere survival, but it screens out the most wondrous part of man's potential experience without his even knowing it. We're shut off from our own world.

My entire career, in fiction or nonfiction, I have reported and written about people who are not like me.

Everybody is going to be what they are, and whatever they are, there's not going to be anything to apologize about.

Even hostile parodies admit from the start that the target has a distinct voice.