Without the balancing context of everyday life, all you have is the news, and news by its nature is generally bad.

Writing is my way of expressing - and thereby eliminating - all the various ways we can be wrong-headed.

The ideal reader cannot sleep when holding the writer he was meant to be with.

Revelation is where all crazy people end up. It's the last stop on the nutso express.

We cannot be all the writers all the time. We can only be who we are. Which leads me to my second point: writers do not write what they want, they write what they can.

Asking why rappers always talk about their stuff is like asking why Milton is forever listing the attributes of heavenly armies. Because boasting is a formal condition of the epic form. And those taught that they deserve nothing rightly enjoy it when they succeed in terms the culture understands.

People profess to have certain political positions, but their conservatism or liberalism is really the least interesting thing about them.