15 Quotes by Nathaniel Rich

Awfulness can happen at any time. That's what's so awful.

The message was: disorder always won in the end. The idea that man could order the world to his own design was the most pitiful fairy tale ever told.

If you devoted your life to the contemplation of disaster, then wasn't an incident-free existence an empty one?

The way other people fantasize about surprise inheritances, firts-glance love, and endless white empyreal pastures, Mitchell dreamed of an erupting supervolcano that would bury North America under a foot of hot ash.

He had no great advice to offer to his clients about this fact. He just wanted them to understand the likelihood that they would be incinerated shortly.

I live in New Orleans, because it's the strangest city in the United States. It has the highest murder rate in the country, the highest incarceration rate, and often we have to boil our drinking water, but there's nowhere else remotely like it.

There is something fascinating about every human being. The question is how much they're willing to divulge.

Criticism always seemed to me a lot like police work. You look for clues, fingerprints, motives. You need to construct an airtight case.

I studied literature and Italian at Yale. I wrote my thesis about Italo Svevo, one of my heroes.