“Here’s all you have to know about men and women: women are crazy, men are stupid. And the main reason women are crazy is that men are stupid.” “The reason I talk to myself is because I’m the only one whose answers I accept.” “Have you ever noticed that anybody driving slower than you is an idiot, and anyone going faster than you is a maniac?” “Fighting for peace is like screwing for virginity....

The alternative is no longer between good and evil, but between murder and murder. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

Fiction, like all art, is primarily an emotional endeavour, and it succeeds or fails on the basis of its emotional sense. The past is a canon we are all entangled with. Whether we know it or not, our combined human history is the reference we all share, and it is emotionally complex beyond any corpus of texts imaginable. Of course structural powers and systemic forces matter, of course political systems and expediencies matter, but power is concentrated in individuals, and individuals have emotional histories....

I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear. – Joan Didion Without history, we are always children of time. Also our memory is very tricky.

Shoveling Snow With Buddha Billy Collins In the usual iconography of the temple or the local Wok you would never see him doing such a thing, tossing the dry snow over a mountain of his bare, round shoulder, his hair tied in a knot, a model of concentration. Sitting is more his speed, if that is the word for what he does, or does not do. Even the season is wrong for him....