Musing takes place in a kind of meadowlands of the imagination, a part of the imagination that has not yet been plowed, developed, or put to any immediately practical use…time spent there is not work time, yet without that time the mind becomes ste...
Already he knew something of the history of the intervening years. He had heard now of the moral decay that had followed the collapse of supernatural religion in the minds of ignoble man, the decline of public honour, the ascendency of wealth. For me...
I had a dream about you. You were washing your car, and I was washing my horse. You thought I belonged in the 19th century, and I thought you belonged in a zoo. I wasn’t alone in thinking that—so were the other 49% of the population that didn’t...
The public never appears to tire of endless courses of strawberries and cream, and the theory that you run the risk of boring people with endless photo montages of the Chelsea Pensioners in their dress reds, or close-ups of a Pimm's Cup sprouting all...
As the nation divided into Federalists and Republicans, each group called the other the worst name possible: "party". Most Americans feared the idea of party; believing that a society should unite to achieve the public good, they denounced parties as...
And with a practice of writing comes a certain important integrity. A culture filled with bloggers thinks differently about politics or public affairs, if only because more have been forced through the discipline of showing in writing why A leads to ...
As science is more and more subject to grave misuse as well as to use for human benefit it has also become the scientist's responsibility to become aware of the social relations and applications of his subject, and to exert his influence in such a di...
If public figures came out of the closet, then the LGBT kids who saw them on TV would feel safe before they even knew why they felt dangerous. Maybe if enough people came out of the closet, gay kids would never feel dangerous. Maybe we could have a w...
A relationship is NOT a test, DO NOT cheat. A relationship is NOT a political party, ADD NOT a third member. A relationship is NOT a public matter, transparency is NOT necessary. A relationship is NOT a burial sceme, it requires not other insurances ...
Obviously it makes a difference if an author has a public online profile of some sort, even just down to the level of having a moderately popular blog. Most books sell 5, 10, or 15 thousand copies. Most are midlist books. With those people, even a mo...
That's the thing: once it's in their hands, it's not my book anymore, it's theirs. I have no idea what happens when they start to digest it. So when someone writes me to explain how they read it, what it was like, what they enjoyed, there's a thrill....
When we consider that so few generations had passed since the church left off disemboweling innocent men before the eyes of their families, burning old women alive in public squares, and torturing scholars to the point of madness for merely speculati...
I'm offended by the kind of smarmy religiosity that's all around us, perhaps more in America than in Europe, and not really that harmful because it's not really that intense or even that serious, but just... you know after a while you get tired of he...
The most necessary task of civilization is to teach people how to think. It should be the primary purpose of our public schools. The mind of a child is naturally active, it develops through exercise. Give a child plenty of exercise, for body and brai...
I am sure if you went back to the days of 'My Fair Lady,' they would have had one public dress rehearsal, and that is it. And in a way, I would like to go back to that. Now you have people tweeting and blogging immediately, so you may as well regard ...
Patriotism means to stand by the country. It does not mean to stand by the president or any other public official, save exactly to the degree in which he himself stands by the country. It is patriotic to support him insofar as he efficiently serves t...
She was never going to seek gainful employment again, that was for certain. She'd remain outside the public sector. She'd be an anarchist, she'd travel with jaguars. She was going to train herself to be totally irrational. She'd fall in love with a t...
Sure, I've felt racism. I think everybody has prejudice. When I was growing up, the dark Mexican kids weren't allowed in the public swimming pool in Dallas. My light-skinned friend got in, and he laughed at us. It didn't seem like a big deal, because...
[T]he strongest defense of the humanities lies not in the appeal to their utility — that literature majors may find good jobs, that theaters may economically revitalize neighborhoods — but rather in the appeal to their defiantly nonutilitarian ch...
All that's needed now is a great novel that will capture the imagination of the public - move them, enrage them, thrill them, terrify them, scandalize them. A story that will seize them by the hand and lead them into the streets where they've never d...
The public execution did not re-establish justice; it reactivated power. In the seventeenth century, and even in the early eighteenth century, it was not, therefore, with all its theatre of terror, a lingering hang-over from an earlier age. Its ruthl...
