Wasting time reading blogs, magazines, newspapers. They have their place but they can become an addiction. And the real ways to gain understanding about issues are reading books and traveling.

I’ve a deplorable tendency to become entrenched in my own prejudices: If I dislike an artist, an art form, or an idea (jazz, ballet, certain kinds of fiction) it is extremely difficult to get me to change my mind, and all evidence presented to the contrary will be discarded and very likely mocked. Of course, nobody suffers but me.

But it seems to me that I’m somebody who is deeply skeptical and trying to combat this skepticism. So my writing is probably situated somewhere between the poles of skepticism and ecstasy, with my dream being to have more ecstatic poems.

I have the same academic disease that any academic will understand, that I get focused on the interesting because that’s appealing to me. Most of the time, most answers are boring. “It’s a respiratory disease. Wear a mask.” That’s a boring example. Trying to be too clever, too smart, almost too contrarian sometimes — I would say that is something that I fight in myself because, like a lot of academics and a lot of intellectual people, I like the answers that surprise me.

People just were the mysterious sum of their actions.

Well, I make the magic wherever I can. I don’t know if that’s conscious or accidental.

It brings the freedom of having seen a lot of things and survived them.

Don’t read your reviews. […] Don’t write reviews. (Your judgment’s always tainted.) […] Don’t write letters to the editor. (No one cares.)

I want to be able to do what I have always done which is to say, "I could do this no better. I could not make this better."

I just lack the basic fact-finding instinct.