For ridding oneself of faith is like boiling seawater to retrieve the salt--something is gained but something is lost.

Sometimes you get a flash of what you look like to other people.

It has historically been a comfort for the bourgeois and that you can read the most extreme books and not change. You can read A Christmas Carol and not change in any way.

Pulchritude--beauty where you would least suspect it, hidden in a word that looked like it should signify a belch or a skin infection.

The end is simply the beginning of an even longer story.

Try to read your own work as a stranger would read it, or even better, as an enemy would.

(Feedback) People become addicted to it. That’s why journalism is so popular, because you want to hear, every day, what people think of what you just wrote. I think a little patience on that front can be good, too.