Storytelling–that’s not the future. The future, I’m afraid, is flashes and impulses. It’s mode up of moments and fragments, and stories won’t survive.

I still have enough faith in language to believe that if I place enough words next to each other on the page, they will start to speak with sounds of their own.

This is why it’s good manners to give gifts in wrappers: so that, for a moment, that beast in all of us that makes us feel alive and keeps us from becoming angels can be...