I worry that we don't currently have a democracy in the United States. Instead we have what [political philosopher] Sheldon Wolin has recently labeled a sort of inverted totalitarianism.

As lovers of truth, we want to be close to it. Sometimes - evil thought, evil temptation - we want to be close to it by misleading others about its presence.

I'm pretty sure my dog, Pip, gets lonely when there is no one to be with him. But we humans can end up with a gnawing worry about that separation possibly becoming a permanent condition.

Of course, each of us has to write our own book, live our own life.

I look back on some of my early reviews of others, and realize to my chagrin that I've been as guilty as anybody else on that front.

It is an admonition to myself when I am reading other people's books. Writing a book is very difficult to do, even a bad one. I try to remember that when reading someone else's work.

None of us is perfect, but the point of our writing is to try to become better, to learn something that we may not have already realized, about ourselves, about the world we inhabit.

We can never leave loneliness behind completely - it is part of what forms us.

At some point just about all of us experience loneliness. In a sense, it is what it means to be a sentient animal, to have an experience of separation from others.

When people have invested their identities into clichés, the only counter argument they have is 'being offended'.

In art, either as creators or participators, we are helped to remember some of the glorious things we have forgotten, and some of the terrible things we were asked to endure...

Don't leave before the miracle happens!

The contemporary historian never writes such a true history as the historian of a later generation.

Social media is less about technology and more about anthropology, sociology, and ethnography.

To get to this place of a warrior’s courage, we must give up the stories that have ruled our lives and shatter the self-image we created to affirm our story.

Paranoia plays into all of us. Trust is a terrifying idea of not knowing who we can rely on.

I'm afraid to do theater now.

Becoming pretty doesn't just change the way you look," she said. "No," David said. "It changes the way you think.