I tend to think of fiction as being mainly about characters and human beings and inner experience, whereas essays can be much more expository and didactic and more about subjects or ideas.

I do things like get in a taxi and say, "The library, and step on it.

It can become an exercise in trying to get the reader to like and admire you instead of an exercise in creative art.

One of the things that makes Wittgenstein a real artist to me is that he realized that no conclusion could be more horrible than solipsism.

If your fidelity to perfectionism is too high, you never do anything.

I know I'm paranoid, but am I paranoid enough?

This might be one way to start talking about differences between the early postmodern writers of the fifties and sixties and their contemporary descendants.

How odd I can have all this inside me and to you it’s just words.

Everybody is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else.

In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.

In reality, there is no such thing as not voting: you either vote by voting, or you vote by staying home and tacitly doubling the value of some Diehard's vote.

I’d never seen anything like it. First a trial, then a few murders, then dancing. Life goes on. Or, in this case, death continues.

It’s how I fill the time when nothing’s happening. Thinking too much, flirting with melancholy.

People are so different in wartime. No one gets to be ordinary. Not really.

Only a free West can help the prisoners of today's left- and right-wing dictatorships.

Positive attitudes qualify you for positive experiences.

Earlier ages fortified themselves behind the sovereign state, behind protectionism and militarism.

The goal is not to speculate on what might happen, but to imagine what you can make happen.

When I'm writing a book - say I'm going to write a parenting book. I'll go out and buy the 100 top parenting books and I will read those, not so I can copy them for sure.

Broken wings fit more easily in standard-size boxes.

It is essential to release humanity from the false fixations of yesterday which seem now to bind it to a rationale of action leading only to extinction.