Power gives no purchase to the hand, it will not hold, soon perishes, and greatness goes.
Twitter is unspeakably irritating. Twitter stands for everything I oppose.
When you stay in your room and rage or sneer or shrug your shoulders, as I did for many years, the world and its problems are impossibly daunting. But when you go out and put yourself in real relation to real people, or even just real animals, there’s a very real danger that you might end up loving some of them. And who knows what might happen to you then?
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.
The place of stillness that you have to go to to write, but also to read seriously, is the point where you can actually make responsible decisions, where you can actually engage productively with an otherwise scary and unmanageable world.
Fiction is a solution, the best solution, to the problem of existential solitude.
Imagine that human existence is defined by an Ache: the Ache of our not being, each of us, the center of the universe; of our desires forever outnumbering our means of satisfying them.
I don't make a distinction between men and women. To me they are just people.
You are the sum total of your dominating or most prominent thoughts.
That's absolutely true, about the eight glasses a day. There's no reason whatsoever to drink eight glasses of water a day unless you, for whatever reason, particularly like the taste of water. Most experts agree that unless there's something horribly wrong with you, you should just drink water whenever you're - get this - thirsty.
The psychological peer pressure that the left has employed - and deployed, actually - on young people has been overwhelmingly successful. It has created droves and droves of people that vote against what they know is right, vote against their own self-interest, in exchange for feeling good about themselves and also being immune from criticism.