I guess my life hasn’t always been happy, or easy, or exactly what I want. At a certain point, I just have to try not to think too much about certain things, or else they’ll break my heart.

Fiction is a solution, the best solution, to the problem of existential solitude.

It's doubtful that anyone with an internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction.

Integrity's a neutral value. Hyenas have integrity, too. They're pure hyena.

Nice people don't necessarily fall in love with nice people.

The personality susceptible to the dream of limitless freedom is a personality also prone, should the dream ever sour, to misanthropy and rage.

The Mekons were kind of like the background music of my life.

Depression presents itself as a realism regarding the rottenness of the world in general and the rottenness of your life in particular.

Reading enables me to maintain a sense of something substantive– my ethical integrity, my intellectual integrity.

Fiction is a particularly effective way for strangers to connect across time and distance

If you want to have friends, you have to remember that nobody's perfect.

Sincerity makes the very least person to be of more value than the most talented hypocrite.

One discipline always leads to another discipline.

I think we have reached such saturation levels, the money at this point doesn't swing election.

The passport changes but the blood doesn't

It's not all about content. It's all about stories. It's not all about stories. It's all about great stories.

In my view, we ought to replace the notion of analytic philosophy by that of synthetic philosophy.

I have been a friend of Paul Manafort's for, I don't know, almost 50 years. We go back to Young Republicans together. He has vehemently denied any wrongdoing and I choose to take him at his word.

Government restrictions are attractive to people who want to impose their pet notions without having to count the costs.

I would rather have been shot straight-up in cold blood-but to be set up? By people who you trusted? That's bad.

Rise above principle and do what is right.