Generally speaking, writers who have been at it for a while, and who are any good at it, suffer from an acute kind of self-knowledge. The unexamined life is not a risk for them.

Life isn’t simple. Literature shouldn’t be either.

I distrust the perpetually busy, always have. The frenetic ones spinning in tight little circles like poisoned rats. The slower ones, grinding away their fourscore and ten in righteousness and pain. They are the soul-eaters.

Gone. The saddest word in the language. In any language.

Such is the privilege of survival: to be allowed to fashion the means that fit our ends, to cobble together a narrative that reveals (as by the divine light of illumination) the predestined arc of...

We’re angry about this, upset about that, but who has the time to do anything anymore? There are those reports to report on, memos to remember, e-mails to deflect or delete. They bury us like...

History resists an ending as surely as nature abhors a vacuum; the narrative of our days is a run-on sentence, every full stop a comma in embryo. But more: like thought, like water, history is...

I was raised to be ashamed of my ignorance, and to try to do something about it if at all possible.

And yet, far off, I can hear something whispering that this compulsion to do, to intrude ourselves, to improve on what is–even when wholly well intentioned, particularly when wholly well intentioned–is the source of all...

I lost my father this past year, and the word feels right because I keep looking for him. As if he were misplaced. As if he could just turn up, like a sock or a...

It’s a race between your foolishness and your allotted days. Good luck.

The only thing your life teaches you is how to live your life. And that’s only if you’re very lucky. And you listen very hard.

The case for the humanities is not hard to make, though it can be difficult–to such an extent have we been marginalized, so long have we acceded to that marginalization–not to sound either defensive or...

There are times in every life when the past acquires a particular resonance, when we grow sensitive to sounds and voices normally beyond the range of hearing. The past shades into present always and everywhere,...

…like a small stone deflected off a larger one, my brother had spun off toward the Almighty, though to my mind the events of that morning could just as well have cast him the other...

I suspect that on some level, life is a matter of indefensible loyalties.

Pleasure and pain are immediate; knowledge, retrospective. A steel ball, suspended on a string, smacks into its brothers and nothing happens: no shock of recognition, no sudden epiphany. We go about our business, buttering the...

Every step you take, a million doors open in front of you like poppies; your next step closes them, and another million bloom. You get on a train, you pick up a lamp, you speak,...

Maybe I lacked coping skills. Maybe I was weak. I cared for people for no better reason than they seemed to care for me, acknowledge me. It didn’t seem so dangerous at the time.