You see, Juan-George, people tend to be impressed with complex ideas, but the basic questions are the hardest part, the basic questions are the most difficult challenge to any serious thinker. Answers get all of the glamour and attention, answers are what everyone seems to be after, but the real value is in basic questions. This is because once you

I asked the driver what had happened, maybe I had missed something. He shrugged and said, Random. At which point my mind returned to Paul Renfro, I wished Paul was sitting next to me, making a mess of his papers, Paul would have given the driver a piece of his mind, as they say. The word random is a white flag of surrender, Paul’s philosophy, for u

I imagined a bus with no windshield and no back window, the bugs could pass straight through.

The measure of a man’s thinking is in how those words are transformed, the measure of a man’s thinking is what he does with other people’s words, they must penetrate him deeply, they must penetrate him to the core, they must filter through his piled-up experiences and opinions, and they must return transformed.

Oppen, my friend, listen, it’s the way of the world, he who laughs last must first endure the laughter of others. Then they took him away.

The police had questions for me, which I answered truthfully, which is a fine strategy for talking to police, though it can confuse them.

JB had repeated Scott Valdez’s phrases without transforming them at all. What came out was what had gone in. Which meant that the phrases hadn’t even grazed JB’s core, they’d only bounced off a series of mirrors inside JB.

There were signs on everything, there were signs on the trees, there were enormous billboards, shop signs, there was writing everywhere. My gift has always been gab, but even if I was a stronger reader I couldn’t imagine reading all of those signs, it was like driving through a crazy book, it would take a hundred years to read it all.

Paul explained that nonthinkers, those who weren’t going to move history forward in any way, those who preferred to let others do their thinking for them, loved the term slippery slope, he explained that slippery slope was a favorite term among those who wanted to erase distinctions between discrete things in order to better control those around th