This was one of those mid-thirties moments when you take a look at the stale, half-chewed bagel your life has become and kiss jealousy on its smokey mouth.

If You Can Stand It, Play the Long Game . . .What I mean here is that you have to remain committed to the ultimate goal, which isn’t to win the immediate approval of the...

But the real life of a writer resides in showing up at the keyboard every day, with the necessary patience and mercy, and making the best decisions you can on behalf of your people. It’s...

Narration, after all, isn’t just a literary function. It represents the human capacity to tell stories in such a manner that they yield meaning. Television replaced this concerted quest for meaning with a frantic pursuit...

To look at the work of your peers, and learn how to explain with kindness and precision, the nature of their mistakes is, in fact, how you learn to diagnose your own work.

The Internet is what you make of it, obviously . . . But the Internet has also been a great aggregator of anxiety and an enabler of our worst tendencies. It has allowed us to...

Art arises from loss. I wish this weren’t the case. I wish that every time I met a new woman and she rocked my world, I was inspired to write my ass off. But that...

In practice, the Internet functions more frequently as a hive of distraction, a simulated world through which most of us flit from one context to the next . . .

It’s like this when you fall hard for a musician. It’s a crush with religious overtones. You listen to the songs and you memorize the words and the notes and this is a form of...

The connection being that in my head all language began in song and that the best stories inevitably reutrn to song, to a state of rapture. For years, I had assumed that throwing beautiful words...

Music has become more pervasive and portable than ever. But it feels less previous in the bargain. I don’t want to confuse artistic and commercial value, but it’s just a fact that some kid who...

Every now and then, I’ll run into someone who claims not to like chocolate, and while we live in a country where everyone has the right to eat what they want, I want to say...

Misery loves another idiot with a jukebox where his soul should be.

All language is an aspiration to music.