I always felt that the great high privilege, relief and comfort of friendship was that one had to explain nothing.
Each time a high-wage job is lost, a family is turned upside down. And that affects the communities where they live.
The entire history of humanity is marked by a single inexorable movement - from animal instinct toward rational thought, from inborn behavior toward acquired knowledge. A half-grown panther abandoned in the wilderness will grow up to be a perfectly normal panther. But a half-grown child similarly abandoned will grow up into an unrecognizable savage, unfit for normal society. Yet there are those who insist the opposite: that we are creatures of instinct, like wolves.
Nothing prepares you for making art except making art. You have to do it to get better.
You ought to be able to grow up in a place and not have to get the hell out of it when you turn eighteen.
If no one heard your sounds then you did not really make them.
When novels deal in abstractions, they generally go off the rails.
Luxury lives in the finer details. It's a cloth napkin at a dinner table. It's a mint on your pillow before bed.
If you want to be forgiven, you have to extend forgiveness, even to people who aren't smart enough to ask for it.
There are only two kinds of certain knowledge: Awareness of our own existence and the truths of mathematics.
A cigarette is the only consumer product which when used as directed kills its consumer.