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“Maybe it’s the fact that most of the arts here are produced by world-weary and sophisticated older people and then consumed by younger people who not only consume art but study it for clues on how to be cool, hip…”

“In a world facing the revolt of ragged and hungry masses of God’s children; in a world torn between the tensions of East and West, white and colored, individuals and collectivists; in a world whose cultural and spiritual power lags so far behind her technological capabilities that we live each day on the verge of [...]

“Art addresses everybody, in the hope of making an impression…”

“A new man is made out of the whole cloth, by a change of heart which alters everything, every living cell of the body. Anything less than a change of heart is sure catastrophe which, if you follow the reasoning, explains why the times are always bad. For, unless there be a change of heart [...]

“What Rick Perry meant to say.”

In honor and support of Occupy Wall Street, we present a special video edition of our Wisdom Coupon.

“Print out your story and put it on a wall. Put it up in a way that allows you to look at it all at once. You might or might not break it up between paragraphs, or scene breaks, or some other obvious structural element that is key to the piece. Look at the patterns [...]

“Say what you mean. I used to be exasperated by such teachers, but am no more. I understand now that all those antique essays and stories with which I was to compare my own work were not magnificent for their datedness or foreignness, but for saying precisely what their authors meant them to say. My [...]

Fine writing has the beauty of both complexity and grandeur.

Only mortal beings experience time as a shaping medium.

The haters seem alive.

The odd privilege of existence as a coherent self.

If we can remember, why can’t we remember everything?

Exploring the meaning of “meaning” in a secular age.

An amuse-bouche from the Irish master’s masterful “Watt.”

We had TV but what had we lost, all of us, when we entered the camp? We’d lost our appendages, our extensions, the data systems that kept us fed and cleansed…

“In a democracy that does not respect intellectual life and is not guided by it, demagogy has free rein…”