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- The big data revolution is the reduction of individual experience to the aggregate; it is really the elimination of the individual data point — and thus the individual.
- We no longer apprehend, we calculate — or rather: our phones calculate for us.
- Good prose always tells the truth, even when it lies.
- To wait for an idea is like waiting for someone to call you back.
- Listening to business people in New York on their lunch break has always been fascinating to me. There’s a completely unique, completely self-contained mode of corporate friendship; corporate camaraderie. This tells me that ‘getting into business’ is really about being indoctrinated in this language, this way of being, rather than acquiring a specific skill.
- The Good is whatever allows us, the organism, to survive. We value what we need.
- So much of the joy of life is in the particular, the local, the unique. A homogenized, globalized, corporatized world, then, is horror, simply because it leaves so much true pleasure out.
- A writer lives in permanent fear of writer’s block — the loss of easy creativity. A writer is a gambler who can’t step away from the table. Who keeps staking it all on the next roll of the dice.
