The end takes a grotesque psychological turn that reminds you that environmental devastation, perhaps especially during our fleeting period of history, is as much a psychological issue as any other.

You come up with a color, or you come up with a word, or you come up with a chord, which maybe seems random, and then you just sort of decide, well, random or not, this is the door that I am going to enter.

Is an upper-class student with access to familial resources as precarious as a single mother working at a fast food restaurant laid off for sounding the alarm against sexual harassment at work?

The Great American Richards are primed to overcome all thoughts about fathers, all thoughts about mothers, all thoughts about wives and children, as though thought about anything is an affliction.

The end takes a grotesque psychological turn that reminds you that environmental devastation, perhaps especially during our fleeting period of history, is as much a psychological issue as any other.

[Niceties] is the rare exception in which the term poetic used to describe fiction isn’t hyperbolic. The stories feel like prose poems because they operate according to associative logic and sonic pleasures.

What is the value of walking soberly and honorably to the guillotine? Why not cry and scream all the way there?

As much as I like reading Cole online, the experience of reading his work in a big chunk is sharper and feels more complete.

You come up with a color, or you come up with a word, or you come up with a chord, which maybe seems random, and then you just sort of decide, well, random or not, this is the door that I am going to enter.

Far from beginning to close the gap, the financial crisis and the recession have opened it even wider. It’s like nothing stops it. Every week there’s a story that is essentially that story.

There are sociologists and anthropologists who can do a great job of describing Italy. They have data, theories, studies, statistics. But a writer arrives at it through language and describes the society that is emerging through language.

Exorcism is just a lie we tell ourselves in order to survive.

The Great American Richards are primed to overcome all thoughts about fathers, all thoughts about mothers, all thoughts about wives and children, as though thought about anything is an affliction.

If beauty is truth and truth is beauty and something I find beautiful and truthful is hideous and deceitful for someone I respect, what can happen except bloodshed, a fight to the death?

The fulfillment we get from nostalgia can only be taken up, at best, in an ossified, brittle sort of way. Wes Anderson must understand this, as it is essentially what is dramatized in The Grand Budapest Hotel.

The mysterious work of the novel in regard to climate change seems less about politics and more about calm, diverse reflection.

Is an upper-class student with access to familial resources as precarious as a single mother working at a fast food restaurant laid off for sounding the alarm against sexual harassment at work?

The novel was merely tyrannical; the listicle is fully totalitarian. There is no experience that can’t be remade in its matrix.

In a 1931 journal entry Wittgenstein wrote, “The works of great masters are suns which rise and set around us. The time will come for every great work that is now in the descendent to rise again.” This may be the most Irie remark that he ever set to paper and serves as a fine […]

I have recently realized that if I had to choose one and one-only sentence to encapsulate my personality, it would be: “a person for whom dancing parties are a matter of the utmost importance.”