I don’t ever believe in violence as a kind of medicine.

In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.

In life and art, there are distinctions to be made between what an act of cruelty consists of.

That’s what we both hate about fiction, or at least crappy fiction—it purports to provide occasions for thinking through complex issues, but really it has predetermined the positions, stuffed a narrative full of false choices,...

Misogyny, when expressed or explored by men, remains a timeless classic.

me.”As if we could scrape the color off the iris and still see.

Evolution strikes me as infinitely more spiritually profound than Genesis.

One thing they don’t tell you ’bout the blues when you got ’em, you keep on fallin’ ’cause there ain’t no bottom,’ sings Emmylou Harris, and she may be right. Perhaps it would help to...

Am I sitting here now, months later, in Los Angeles, writing all this down, because I want my life to matter? Maybe so. But I don’t want it to matter more than others. I want...

Mostly I have felt myself becoming a servant of sadness. I am still looking for the beauty in that.

So far as I can tell, most worthwhile pleasures on this earth slip between gratifying another and gratifying oneself. Some would call that an ethics.

I want you to know, if you ever read this, there was a time when I would rather have had you by my side than any one of these words; I would rather have had...

It is light.”240. All right then, let me try to rephrase. When I was alive, I aimed to be a student not of longing but of light.

For to wish to forget how much you loved someone– and then, to actually forget– can feel, at times, like the slaughter of a beautiful bird who chose, by nothing short of grace, to make...

Art to me is not precious enough that I feel territorial about what the word gets applied to. Conversations about what counts as art and what doesn’t doesn’t captivate my attention very much.

I don’t think there’s any formula for what makes great art.