“Big writers become a kind of shared climate.”

Frauds master our minds; magicians, like poets and lovers, engage them in a permanent maze of possibilities.

The past is so often unknowable not because it is befogged now but because it was befogged then, too, back when it was still the present.

Writing is the process of finding something to distract you from writing, and of all the helpful distractions – adultery, alcohol and acedia, all of which aided our writing fathers – none can equal the Internet.

I try to turn a written thing, when I’m in trouble with it, into a spoken thing: I start imagining what I would say to someone if I were trying to tell the story or make the argument.

What drives innovation is abundance and ease, not the pressure of scarcity.

The future will be like the past, in the sense that, no matter how amazing or technologically advanced a society becomes

I think if journalists start doing that then they won’t be practicing journalism. If satirists start doing that then they won’t be practicing satire.

Of all the unexpected things in contemporary literature, this is among the oddest: that kids have an inordinate appetite for very long, very tricky, very strange books about places that don’t exist…

It was the grander French one: Why not kill yourself tonight? That the answers come to much the same thing in the end-easy does it

I don’t miss the obligation to be opinionated, but I do regret the chance to share a joy.

For me, the beauty of the blank page, or empty screen,staring up at nine thirty after two cups of coffee and a deep breath remains unique.

A fact about photography: we can look at people’s faces in photographs with an intensity and intimacy that in life we normally only reserve for extreme emotional states

The World Series is played in my doubtless too-nostalgic imagination in some kind of autumn afternoon light, and seeing it exclusively in the bitter chill of midnight breaks the spell of even the best of games.

Writing doesn’t come easily to anyone, I think, certainly not to me. But pressure and practice does lend a certain fluency

Paris, on the other hand, looked exactly as it was supposed to look. It wore its heart on its sleeve, and the strange thing was that the heart it wore so openly was in other ways so closed-mysterious, uninviting.

In bookstores, my stuff is usually filed in the out-of-the-way, additional interest sections.

The fight is not over yet. The fight is only over when the people say it’s over.

Regrowth takes time the world does not have to solve climate change

That we live in a post-truth society today, and that we don’t care, that we have lost empathy. We have stopped caring for each other in a way. We have stopped thinking long-term and sustainable. And that’s something that goes much deeper than just climate crisis deniers.

Avoiding climate breakdown will require cathedral thinking. We must lay the foundation while we may not know exactly how to build the ceiling.

To protect, restore and rewild the living world is probably the most effective solution we have at hand to fight both the climate- and ecological emergencies.

I wonder, what will you tell your children was the reason to fail and leave them facing the climate chaos you knowingly brought upon them?

We can’t call for climate justice while advocating for policies and phase-out-dates based on targets that exclude aspect of equity and historic emissions.

We live in a strange world, where we think we can buy or build our way out of a crisis that has been created by buying and building things. Where a football game or a film gala gets more media attention than the biggest crisis humanity has ever faced.