It’s natural to think of one’s own life as a novel (or a movie or a play), and within that narrative we are always the central character. Thoughtful people try to overcome this compulsion, but...

Art and love are the same thing: It’s the process of seeing yourself in things that are not you.

We are always dying, all the time. That’s what living is; living is dying, little by little. It is a sequenced collection of individualized deaths.

There’s one kind of writing that’s always easy: Picking out something obviously stupid and reiterating how stupid it obviously is. This is the lowest form of criticism, easily accomplished by anyone. And for most of...

The only people who can ever put ideas into context are people who don’t care; the unbiased and apathetic are usually the wisest dudes in the room. If you want to totally misunderstand why something...

Everyone knows that the Internet is changing our lives, mostly because someone in the media has uttered that exact phrase every single day since 1993. However, it certainly appears that the main thing the Internet...

Wishing for control is like wishing for the rapture.

I once loved a girl who almost loved me, but not as much as she loved John Cusack.

Real people are actively trying to live like fake people, so real people are no less fake. Every comparison becomes impractical. This is why the impractical has become totally acceptable; impracticality almost seems cool.

421Life is fucking confusing. I don’t know anything, and neither do you.

But-when you really think about it-that emotional support only applies to the experience of living in public. We don’t have ways to quantify ideas like “amazing” or “successful” or “lovable” without the feedback of an...

The deeper reality is that I’m not sure if what I do is real. I usually believe that I’m certain about how I feel, but that seems naive. How do we know how we feel?…There...

It’s far easier to write why something is terrible than why it’s good. If you’re reviewing a film and you decide “This is a movie I don’t like,” basically you can take every element of...