In the age of networked everything, life moves sideways and covers lots of ground while barely touching the earth.

The strange anthropological lesson of social media is that human beings, if given a choice, often prefer to socialize alone.

A writer is someone who tells you one thing so someday he can tell his readers another thing: what he was thinking but declined to say, or what he would have thought had he been wiser. A writer turns his life into material, and if you’re in his life, he uses yours, too.

The human body is strangely made and sometimes it pays not to think about it too closely.

A writer has a use for his experiences that most civilians simply don’t; he or she discerns material in situations that others simply live through. Perhaps there are some who disapprove of this, but without this double consciousness, literature would not get made at all.

I could see tall ideas standing up behind his eyes.

Is it possible to be wiser on the page than you are in life? I’m hoping so.

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

It’s the little deceptions that no one catches that are going to dissolve it all someday. We’ll look at clocks and we won’t believe the hands. They’ll forecast sun but we’ll pack our slickers anyway.

The best critic needn’t be right, just interesting.