"He sat in the window thinking. Man has a tropism for order. Keys in one pocket, change in another. Mandolins are tuned G D A E. The physical world has a tropism for disorder, entropy. Man against Nature . . . the battle of the centuries. Keys yearn to mix with change. Mandolins strive to get out of tune. Every order has within it the germ of destruction. All order is doomed, yet the battle is worth while."

"Our failure to discern a universal good does not record any lack of insight or ingenuity, but merely demonstrates that nature contains no moral messages framed in human terms. Morality is a subject fo…"

"It’s not as if we’re specifically thinking of jokes for adults and jokes for children. We think of jokes, and occasionally we’ll think of an adult one, but it’ll detract from the story. People will sa…"

"There is no better means of reducing a fallacious variety of thought to absurdity than to let it live itself out completely."

"After I finished reporting for this book on President Trump, I felt weariness. The country was in real turmoil. The virus was out of control. The economy was in crisis with more than 40 million out of…"