A writer turns his life into material, and if you’re in his life, he uses yours, too.

There are moments when it frightens us, threatening to expose us as inauthentic. Well, the big-time impostors we read about in literature run this risk constantly, flirting with destruction, not just humiliation or embarrassment. It's a spectacle that we can't help but find compelling, and it involves a certain level of courage that we sneakily admire, perhaps.

Memo to extreme partisans: If you can't bring yourselves to love your enemies, can you at least learn to hate your friends?

The strange anthropological lesson of social media is that human beings, if given a choice, often prefer to socialise alone.

You thought you were found but you realize that you were lost, and someday you may discover that you're lost now.

He knows, as all the cleverest ones do, that no human being is so interesting that he can't make himself more interesting still by acting retarded at random intervals.

realized that at a level I'd never been conscious we'd been engaged in a game of wits for years. I suppose most writer-subject pairings are like that. Of course, I'd set aside my plan to write about him [Clark Rockfeller] as soon as I'd gotten to know him some, but now I'd resumed that intention.