Guilt wants to cover all the bases, be everywhere at once, reach into the past to tweak, neaten and repair. Guilt like Tourettic utterance flows usel… - Jonathan Lethem

Just handling this ocean of different books — new and used, in and out of print, famous and forgotten — it was literature as this giant mosaic of texts and experiments and attitudes. I think it’s just very liberating to break out of a great man’s theory of history.

I guess I’ve always liked working from that sense of — what would you call it? — license that the margins permit. I always just visualize myself writing books that were meant one day to be dusty, forgotten volumes being encountered by intrepid browsers in a used bookstore. It was a much less freighted way to think about trying to enter the conversation than to imagine I had to write The Great Gatsby.

I wouldn't presume to weigh suffering against sins.

Winter days were static glimpsed between channel flips.