Do what is difficult because it is difficult. Do what will cost you the most. Who these people?
Consider rereading, how risky it is, especially when the book is one that you loved. Always the chance that it won't hold up, that you might, for whatever reason, not love it as much. When this happen...
During the 1980s, in California, a large number of Cambodian women went to their doctors with the same complaint: they could not see. The women were all war refugees. Before fleeing their homeland, th...
Graffiti on Philosophy Hall: The examined life ain’t worth it either.
Cell phones do not belong in fiction, an editor once scolded in the margin of one of my manuscripts, and ever since - more than two decades now - I have wondered at the disconnect between tech-filled...
Here are more lines from The Great Gatsby. I liked to walk up Fifth Avenue and pick out romantic women from the crowd and imagine that in a few minutes I was going to enter into their lives, and no on...
Here is what I learned: Simone Weil was right. Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring.
I Am the Architect of My Own Destiny,
I believe that fear of being a failure plays a large part in goading many women who are ambivalent about motherhood into maternity. That, and the fear of missing out,
To draw me out, the therapist asks what I did for the holidays. When I tell him he says gently (he says everything gently), Sounds like that's one of the ways your loss has affected you: not wanting t...
Another question: why do people often find animal suffering harder to accept than the suffering of other human beings?
What do dogs think when they see someone cry? Bred to be comforters, they comfort us. But how puzzling human unhappiness must be to them. We who can fill our dishes any time and with as much food as w...
There's a certain type of person who, having read this far, is anxiously wondering: Does something bad happen to the dog?
Your whole house smells of dog, says someone who comes to visit. I say I'll take care of it. Which I do by never inviting that person to visit again.
You write a thing down because you’re hoping to get a hold on it. You write about experiences partly to understand what they mean, partly not to lose them to time. To oblivion.
Are you a political prisoner, Dooley?Her blue eyes, immense now in her gaunt face, turned a pitying gaze on the reporter who'd asked her this. Yes, she said. And so are you.
I was not the only one who made the mistake of thinking that, because it was something you talked about a lot, it was something you wouldn't do. And after all, you were not the unhappiest person we kn...
Any writer worth his salt knows that only a small proportion of literature does more than partly compensate people for the damage they have suffered in learning to read. Rebecca West.
If I bring him home though, I swear he’ll spend the rest of his life waiting by the door. And he deserves better than that, don’t you think?’Yes, I think, my heart breaking.
If reading really does increase empathy, as we are constantly being told that it does, it appears that writing takes some away.
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