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?

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

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.”

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.

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.

Fiction writers’ opinions on current events have a basic, ironic appeal: Credentials, qualifications — they have none.

It is not often I read a novel so enthusiastic and unconstrained (and so funny) in its use of language and in its building of worlds.

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.

In the novel, I built up the plot about halfway, and let the characters take over from there; I just watched what they did, and sometimes they did awful, gory things.

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.

The lost innocence and deteriorating sanity of AMERICAN HUSTLE’s protagonists is meant to play less as tragedy than as camp.

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.”

The click of roller skates echoes under the high, vaulted ceiling. And the Virgin Mary gazes down upon it all, smiling benevolently, as if to say, Let’s have a good time tonight. Let’s celebrate. It’s all right.

It turns out that in Chelsea all they’ve got is Chardonnay, and you can’t see the art for the money anyhow. In Soho all they’ve got now is clothes. So where do you, the young art-liker turn?

In my experience, our burden of being unspeakably alone is eased by a subscription to Netflix, especially if you consider that nothing happens after we die and then we just sleep forever, more or less.