The one practice I kept was writing. It made the cut because I can’t deny how many good things in my life have come as a result of my putting words out into the world. It also felt like a respite: one area where I wasn’t skeptical of my identity. I’m at my most courageous on the page because interrogating my feelings with words feels justified and

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He says that being a hater, even if you’re actually right, is fundamentally uninteresting, and just being mean about other people’s work, even if you do it privately, doesn’t make you smarter or better. He says that Wyeth’s essential problem is that he doesn’t just have a cop in his head, he has every imagined audience and every response they would... See more

The first belief is that reading “seriously” matters , especially if you take your taste/intellect/capacity to create seriously. The definition of “serious” is highly personal, of course, but all of us have an instinctive sense of what it means and when we aren’t doing it. We usually know when we’re reading something that’s good for us—and we know,... See more