Citations

Algorithms to Live By.

Mateen’s father, Seddique Mateen, told reporters his son had never mentioned being homosexual. “I don’t believe he was a whatever you call it,” he said.

In the 1990s, the American Pain Society, a nonprofit organization of medical professionals with the stated goal of reducing pain-related suffering by advocating for changes in public policy, started pushing for pain to be...

One of his appearances in Rome’s criminal records is in a testimony by a waiter at the Moor restaurant who had the misfortune to serve Caravaggio and his mates a plate of artichokes, half of them fried in oil and half in...

Resist closed forms, resist masterpieces. The urge to create masterpieces is a kind of necrophilia. Writing must be open on all sides so that the draft of real life — gloomy, farcical life — can pass through it, rifling its...

Bolaño’s insight, and it is both unsettling and unshackling, is that the only subject left to write about is the epilogue of Literature: the story of the people who pursue Literature, scratching on their knees for the traces...

The narrator of Enrique Vila-Matas’s Montano’s Malady suffers from a kind of “literary sickness,” wherein he experiences the world only in terms of the books he has read by the great names of literary history.

The words of Pessoa ring in our ears: ‘Since we are unable to extract beauty from life, we attempt at least to extract it from our incapacity to extract beauty from life.’

Not only one of the (many) unread classics, Don Quixote is a book almost no one seems to have any intention of reading. People don’t feel bad about ignoring it, don’t need to pretend they’ve read it, don’t say they’ve always...

“This idea of an artist as a single person, sitting in the studio all day, is a myth now,” says Cooper. “It’s unaffordable and unrealistic. Every artist is in this precarious world. Everyone does five different jobs to support...