Sublime

I was widely respected and liked. I could float among the groups with ease, could stick up for anyone at will (and usually did). But I never belonged to anything in particular, and that is true of all floaters. Also, those girls that do stick by their principles and behave admirably during junior high school are respected, but generally shunned. I

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This will always be your struggle whether you are twenty-one or fifty-one. I know this from experience. When I quit the New York Times to be a full-time mother, the voices of the world said that I was nuts. When I quit it again to be a full-time novelist, they said I was nuts again. But I am not nuts. I am happy. I am successful on my own terms.... See more

Remnick does not dispute her account. “I think I would be happy if Judith Thurman wanted to write next about the National Football League,” he explained to me in an email. “The point is, I love reading her on whatever moves her, and she is a woman of parts, of wide-ranging interests and sensibility, a deep reader of literature, someone with a keen... See more

I asked Kelly about the tradeoffs of focusing on a single thing if you want to be great (which is what I had been getting at before). “Greatness is overrated,” he said, and I perked up. “It’s a form of extremism, and it comes with extreme vices that I have no interest in. Steve Jobs was a jerk. Bob Dylan is a jerk.”

Taste comes in lanes. To quote Susan Sontag again, “There is taste in people, visual taste, taste in emotion — and there is taste in acts, taste in morality. Intelligence, as well, is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas. One of the facts to be reckoned with is that taste tends to develop very unevenly. It's rare that the same person has good... See more