Good novels are produced by people who voluntarily isolate themselves and go deep, and report from the depths on what they find.
His tiredness hurt so much it kept him awake.
I don’t personally like the e-readers they’ve come up with so far. I don’t fetishize books, but I do like that they’re solid and unchanging.
You’re either reading a book or you’re not.
Nothing got inside the head without becoming pictures.
I think the mission for the writer is to tell stories in a compelling way about the stuff that cannot be talked about, that cannot be gotten at with shallow media.
Reading enables me to maintain a sense of something substantive– my ethical integrity, my intellectual integrity.
If multiculturalism succeeds in making us a nation of independently empowered tribes, each tribe will be deprived of the comfort of victimhood and be forced to confront human limitation for what it is: a fixture of life.
We may freak out globally, but we suffer locally.
Brooklyn was like Philadelphia made better by its proximity to Manhattan.
There’s a hazardous sadness to the first sounds of someone else’s work in the morning; it’s as if stillness experiences pain in being broken.
There is, after all, a kind of happiness in unhappiness, if it’s the right unhappiness.
The problem was money and the indignities of life without it. Every stroller, cell phone, Yankees cap, and SUV he saw was a torment. He wasn’t covetous, he wasn’t envious. But without money he was hardly a man.
I’m not too concerned what happens to my books after I’m dead. But I am very concerned by what’s going on with the culture of reading and writing nowadays.
You encountered a misery near the end of the day and it took a while to gauge its full extent. Some miseries had sharp curvature and could be negotiated readily. Others had almost no curvature and you knew you’d be spending hours turning the corner. Great whopping-big planet-sized miseries.
I admire your capacity for admiring.
Without privacy there was no point in being an individual.
Being dead’s only a problem if you know you’re dead, which you never do because you’re dead!
If you look at the New Testament, it’s a gospel of love. Yes, there’s talk of judgement and there’s talk of heaven and there’s talk of people not getting into heaven, but it doesn’t seem to me that the fundamental message of the gospels was one of guilt and retribution so much as love.
He had a happy canine way of seeking approval without seeming insecure.