My new Moots bicycle jacket is used

Language should act as if it's happy to be alive, even if used in the service of unhappiness.

When something's well written or well said, it's like the words couldn't wait to get into what they're wearing.

To hear Philip Roth the novelist say of fiction, "I don't want to read any more of it, write any more of it, and I don't even want to talk about it anymore", as he said the other day in an interview with a French magazine, is the sort of thing only a man named Philip Roth could say.

What Philip Roth said fits him perfectly, though it's kind of sad to hear him say it--as if writing fiction was like being a plumber or an accountant or a housepainter, something one did for awhile and was good enough to make money at, then retired from as soon as possible.

Sometimes it's best not to say or write anything at all, to simply stand at a distance and admire the many shapes of silence, leaving the thing you haven't written or said alone so that it can speak to you directly in all its perfectly expressed glory.