“The author should strive to be silent in his novel.”

“Never name a ship after your wife in one of your novels, then sink it in the next chapter...”

“My life feels like someone else's, and I wish he were more interesting.”

“Writing... is like putting a message in a bottle, and casting it into the evening tide... It is a container of yourself, bled through your fingertips, and it travels the world in your place.”

“There is no effort in collecting judgements. Being wise with them requires a act of true character.”

“His first memory is an execution.”

“It was the task of industrial society to destroy all of that. All that "community" implies -- self-sufficiency, mutual aid, morality in the marketplace, stubborn tradition, regulation by custom, organic knowledge instead of mechanistic science -- had to be steadily and systematically disrupted and displaced. All of the practices that kept the individual from being a consumer had to be done away with so that the cogs and wheels of an unfettered machine called "the economy" could operate without interference, influenced merely by invisible hands and inevitable balances and all the rest of that benevolent free-market system guided by what Cobbett called, his lip curled toward Hume and James Steuart and Adam Smith, "Scotch Feelosophy.”