“The successful memoirist [blogger] respects facts, uses them accurately, rigorously represses the human impulse to lie or embellish, but knows that truth is both different from facts and greater than facts, and not always their sum.”

When a new writer defends his “style,” the teacher smiles (or cringes) because real style isn’t an artifice. Real style – voice – arrives on its own, as an extension of a writer’s character.

When style is done self-consciously and purposefully it becomes affectation, and as transparent as any affectation – an English accent on an old college chum from New Jersey, for example.

If I had ever really ‘faced the facts’ about myself, I never would have reached for even a zillionth of what I’ve managed to accomplish.

Facts’ are the bounds of human knowledge, set for it, not by it.

That’s why I always recommend a psychedelic experience because it makes you realize that all you’ve learned is in fact just learned and not necessarily the truth.

I am not today, nor have I ever been a Jew, and as a matter of fact, I am uncircumcised.

Each individual in fact has moral responsibility for the acts which he personally performs; no one can be exempted from this responsibility, and on the basis of it everyone will be judged by God himself.

I am also a writer. That is a fact not known by the public in general.

Especially in recent years, the more and more we understand what we are doing, the more we have the science to tell us what we’re doing, the fact that we continue to do it without taking steps to address it strikes me as, among many other things, irreverent in an extreme.

Psychologically, you have to have confidence in yourself and this confidence should be based on fact.