Everyone loves a witch hunt as long as it’s someone else’s witch being hunted.

Liars are exhausting people.

Reason leavened with a little wit (if possible) is the real alternative to hate speech, meaning that there’s no better time for it.

My advice for aspiring writers is go to New York. And if you can’t go to New York, go to the place that represents New York to you, where the standards for writing are high,...

This is how it works now with the news: the story begins with a moral, then a narrative is fashioned to support it.

bobbybaird i’m a writer, so are you. we try to compose our thoughts and words for effect as well as sense. vain of us? a bit.

[T]he anti-vitriol vitriol is getting ugly.

The mist just keeps on lifting and soon I’ll be able to see all the way, as far as the earth’s curvature allows. It’s a blessing, that curvature, that hidden hemisphere-if we could take it...

We were all journalists, professional truth-seekers, but one thing we knew about the truth that laymen were prone to disregard was that it need not be literal or factual; the unpredictable human personality was itself...

When Loughner himself speaks and we find out his real influences are Spiderman, ‘Gnome Chomsky,’ Taylor Swift, and Dr. Bronner, then what?

Memo to extreme partisans: If you can’t bring yourselves to love your enemies, can you at least learn to hate your friends?

I’ve been told my old city possesses a ‘thriving arts scene,’ whatever that is; personally, I think artists should lie low and stick to their work, not line-dance through the parks.

Literature had torn Tessa and me apart, or prevented us from merging in the first place. That was its role in the world, I’d started to fear: to conjure up disagreements that didn’t matter and...

Given Loughner’s obsession with meaninglessness and language, maybe Foucault & Derrida deserve some fault here, too.