Even though I don’t speak Portuguese, I have the word golfinho seared into my memory, the sound clear and vivid and the pronunciation of each vowel flawless in my ear.

Spend a little time with Dostoevsky if you’re ever feeling a bit glum.

To spend the majority of your time crafting artificial symbols on a surface—whether your medium is stone, paper, or pixels—will always be a curious behavior.

Museum exhibit labels have the peculiar quality of giving you both too much and not enough information.

To read an incomplete manuscript is to catch a writer in the nude

If you are ever lost in an Italian city, look for Dante Alighieri street.

Tossing out the word fate might be sufficient to hush most dinner parties.

Despite the desires of some readers, nobody should expect any good novels about Covid.

He will forever have grand plans for the world, and the world will forever disappoint him with its failures.

Most contemporary non-fiction books take three hundred pages to tell a one hundred page story.

An incredible change in trajectory

On Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread

And now we’ve reached the time of year when the weather acts like a jester, teasing us with hints of sun on still chilly days.

Later is a word for when you’re feeling sluggish and directionless and just a little bit glum, for when you’re avoiding what you must confront.

To decide to write isn’t also to decide that you’ll be the most loathsome dinner guest.

Nothing makes you doubt the merits of a music education more than a neighbor who takes up the violin.

Understanding what triggers the desire to rush toward and cover a crisis isn’t an easy task.

To dither and obsess and talk about limitations is the luxury of those not busy with the work.

What the reader feels and thinks and has already experienced is what the novel of validation delivers.

Somewhere along the way—in a shift that began more than a decade ago—my thinking reversed.