I’d like to be the sort of person who can enjoy things at the time, instead of having to go back in my head and enjoy them.
Whatever you get paid attention for is never what you think is most important about yourself.
Good writing isn’t a science. It’s an art, and the horizon is infinite. You can always get better.
Fiction becomes a weird way to countenance yourself and to tell the truth instead of being a way to escape yourself or present yourself in a way you figure you will be maximally likable.
Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.
The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you.
Almost anything that you pay close, direct attention to becomes interesting.
You will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do.
What goes on inside is just too fast and huge and all interconnected for words to do more than barely sketch the outlines of at most one tiny little part of it at any given instant.
It did what all ads are supposed to do: create an anxiety relievable by purchase.
That everything is on fire, slow fire, and we’re all less than a million breaths away from an oblivion more total than we can even bring ourselves to even try to imagine...
True heroism is minutes, hours, weeks, year upon year of the quiet, precise, judicious exercise of probity and care – with no one there to see or cheer. This is the world.
God seems to have a kind of laid-back management style I’m not crazy about.
I perhaps could have been somewhat better. One of the interesting things about playing competitive sports as a child is that you confront your own limitations rather starkly at a certain point.
I don’t think writers are any smarter than other people. I think they may be more compelling in their stupidity, or in their confusion.
Of course, the fact that Dostoevsky can tell a juicy story isn’t enough to make him great. If it were, Judith Krantz and John Grisham would be great fiction writers, and by any but the most commercial standards they’re not even very good.
Certain sincerely devout and spiritually advanced people believe that the God of their understanding helps them find parking places and gives them advice on Mass. Lottery numbers.
There’s a weird kind of paradox that the more expensive the vacation is, the more potentially anxiety-producing it is.
Acceptance is usually more a matter of fatigue than anything else.
Everything takes time. Bees have to move very fast to stay still.