John Wilkes Booth and Lee Harvey Oswald meet in hell and team up to assassinate Satan.
It’s been a tough couple of years for condescending nerds. And if bookstores fall, Jon, America will be inundated with a wandering, snarky underclass of unemployable purveyors of useless and arcane esoterica.
That which is hard to do is best done bitterly.
We have all been empowered by the web: everyone with a keyboard can now effectively broadcast to a national audience. In a sense, it puts each of us on the same footing as the major media conglomerates, except for AOL, who now apparently own all our thoughts and teeth.
Life may be miraculous in its unlikelihood in the universe, but it would be a fallacy to suggest that its rareness makes it inextinguishable.
The reality is that there is an enormous value to gut-check instinctive decision-making in the world that is not hampered by reams and reams of research and complexity.
We estimate that there are perhaps 20,000 prehistoric hunter-gatherers frozen up in those glaciers. Now, if they simply thaw and wander around, it’s not a problem, but if they find a leader – a Captain Caveman, if you will – we’ll be facing an even more serious problem.
The few people who ask to have their photographs with me, I almost always say yes, except for a few circumstances, like when my family is around.
There is no ritual that enhances creativity other than just starting.
This is one of the defining sorrows of books: that we cannot see one another.
I do not think that a museum needs to engage with pop culture in order to make itself interesting to museumgoers. Museums are already interesting and engaging with pop culture for its own sake is just a quick way to seem and become dated.
For a long time, I would write without music, because I thought it was distracting until I appreciated that it actually unlocks a certain unconscious productivity vault in my mind.
Truth may be stranger than fiction, goes the old saw, but it is never as strange as lies.
Specificity is the soul of narrative.
Even in my own life, there are memories I have that are difficult to explain – happenings that are so odd and unaccountably weird, that it is difficult to imagine they were not the result of prolonged and frequent contact with aliens throughout my life.
The very idea that there is no truth, but only the filter of narrative through which truth is invented is something I learned at the feet of the most leftist professors at Yale and am learning again from Sarah Palin during the Vice Presidential debate, and I find that very disorienting.
As a freelance writer, I’d be asked to become an expert for various magazines on any subject, whether food or wine or history or the life span of veterinarians. I was completely unschooled in any of these things.
I would be good for maybe not the center square but an upper square on ‘Hollywood Squares.’
I am someone who values knowledge, actual knowledge. I also value stories and fiction a whole lot, and that’s where the fake knowledge comes in.
I used to enjoy the anonymity of being a literary figure and occasionally a public radio figure.