the intellectual life

Success — especially in the creative field — requires a microdosage of subclinical narcissism. “If you aren’t even in love and obsessed with your writing,” he would ask me rhetorically, “why should anyone give a f**k about what you have to say?”

As always, I encourage you to ask the seemingly stupid question: Why should I be productive? Why should I do something faster? Why is efficiency good? Maybe you’ll get good affirming answers. Maybe you’ll discover a more complex reality that requires us to think more critically and act more circumspectly.

Follow curiosities down deep rabbit holes and emerge with unique ideas. Partake in vivid and varied adventures to build up a set of experiences that is unique to you. Run away from the areas in which you are average and towards those where you might be special.

When I have a piece of writing in mind, what I have, in fact, is a mental bucket: an attractor for and generator of thought. It’s like a thematic gravity well, a magnet for what would otherwise be a mess of iron filings. I’ll read books differently and listen differently in conversations. In particular I’ll remember everything better; everything... See more

the most useful quality for any nonfiction book—full of portable intellectual tools. By that, I mean: ideas which help you reframe other parts of the world and understand them more deeply.

The way to come up with new ideas is not to try explicitly to, but to try to solve problems and simply not discount weird hunches you have in the process

If the writing process offers any glimmers of enlightenment, it stems from the effort to see yourself through the eyes of the reader, to put yourself in her place and read your words as though they were the words of another. Writing is not a reflection of the self but its transmutation. The act requires externalizing the contents of one’s mind into... See more