"Yeah. We went through John Varley to William Gibson and Neal Stephenson; we looked inward. We looked inward at hacking the body, inward at hacking the brain. We dove into cyberspace. We got into the micro rather than the macro. We tunneled down into the code, into the dysgenic spiral, into the cells. And there are great questions there of identity, of the soul, of what's biological real, what the nature of humanity is precisely. But we lose the scale of the space opera that preceded it."

"For some reason, I told Kyle about how I'd asked my daughter recently what she wanted to be for Halloween, and she'd said "a confused chicken." This apparently meant dressing up like a chicken but pretending not to know what she was. I couldn't help thinking she'd hit upon a deep ontological truth: the idea that who you were would be obvious to everyone else but yourself."

"Well, the first tenet of Chipmunk sportswriting is that you hype what's interesting, not what's hyped."

“If I could do it,” Agee declares, “I’d do no writing at all here. It would be photographs; the rest would be fragments of cloth, bits of cotton, lumps of earth, records of speech, pieces of wood and iron, phials of odors, plates of food and of excrement. Booksellers would consider it quite a novelty; critics would murmur, yes, but is it art; and I could trust a majority of you to use it as you would a parlor game… “

Conor Friedersdorf's annual collection of the very best that journalism has to offer.

"When I teach freshman writing, my first job is to destroy my students' illusions. TV shows and films give them the dangerous idea that great authors just wait to get inspired, and then genius pours out of their pens in an unstoppable flood. The reality is different. Writers—especially the great ones—mostly sit at desks feeling rotten, struggling to write crumpled sentences that they can smooth into something acceptable."

"Remember, the only kind of criticism that doesn’t make you a better writer is dishonest criticism. That, and someone telling you that you have weird shoulders.

...

A writer’s brain is full of little gifts, like a piñata at a birthday party. It’s also full of demons, like a piñata at a birthday party in a mental hospital. The truth is, it’s demons that keep a tortured writer’s spirit alive, not Tootsie Rolls. Sure they’ll give you a tiny burst of energy, but they won’t do squat for your writing. So treat your demons with the respect they deserve, and with enough prescriptions to keep you wearing pants."

"I dug up a list I wrote over a year ago that was a sort of personal set of principles for my own writing on the web, to see how well I'd met my own standards."

How to grammar gooder.

The postmodern founders’ patricidal work was great, but patricide produces orphans, and no amount of revelry can make up for the fact that writers my age have been literary orphans throughout our formative years. We’re kind of wishing some parents would come back. And of course we’re uneasy about the fact that we wish they’d come back–I mean, what’s wrong with us? Are we total pussies? Is there something about authority and limits we actually need? And then the uneasiest feeling of all, as we start gradually to realize that parents in fact aren’t ever coming back–which means “we’re” going to have to be the parents.

"Stories aren’t about things. Stories are things.

Stories aren’t about actions. Stories are, unto themselves, actions."

Here's a kick in the pants.

"It’s something of a cliché, but the older I get, the more I find that learning more about an area where I once held a strong opinion will often mean realizing just how limited my own understanding is."