“Thanks so much for your letter. I am very glad to hear you have a novel that will be out in November. I hope you won’t have as much trouble about keeping people from having parties for you as I am having. Around here if you publish the number of whiskers on the local pigs, everybody has to give you a tea. If you don’t send me a copy of your book, I will go to the extreme of buying one.”

Flannery O'Connor

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“The vampires in your life can’t be cured. Your best bet is to stay away from them. As Lynda Barry said, ‘You cannot fix Dracula by trying to convince him to just party in the sun with you.'”

Austin Kleon

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“I should have asked you to take off your shoes at the door—you know, Japanese style—and put your iPhone in your shoes! And turn it off, so it doesn’t ring. Someday maybe this’ll happen, but it’s not guaranteed to make someone like me very popular.”

V. Vale

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“I really don’t like adults at all.”

Maurice Sendak

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“I like on the table,
when we’re speaking,
the light of a bottle
of intelligent wine.”

Pablo Neruda

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“Seating plans, in my opinion, are a form of social incarceration.”

Elizabeth McCracken

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“You asked me to come and see you—I must speak of that. I thank you, A., but I don’t go from home, unless emergency leads me by the hand, and then I do it obstinately, and draw back if I can. Should I ever leave home, which is improbable, I will, with much delight, accept your invitation; till then, my dear A., my warmest thanks are yours, but don’t expect me.”

Emily Dickinson

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“All this talking, this rather liquid confessing, was something I didn’t think I could ever bring myself to do. It seemed foolhardy to me, like an uncooked egg deciding to to come out of its shell: there would be a risk of spreading out too far, turning into a formless puddle.”

Margaret Atwood

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“The joy of my life with Harry is coming home from a fancy dinner with Harry—and Harry always hates the dinner, whatever it is—and him making himself a marmalade on toast standing in the kitchen and him ranting, ‘How the hell could it have gone on as long as it did?’”

Tina Brown

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“Practicing a piece of music for four hours requires focused attention, but it is nowhere near as cognitively demanding as a sleepover with 14-year-old girls. Managing status rivalries, negotiating group dynamics, understanding social norms, navigating the distinction between self and group—these and other social tests impose cognitive demands that blow away any intense tutoring session or a class at Yale.”

David Brooks

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“Exploration of my (apparently vital) need of solitude: and yet I have a (no less vital) need of my friends.
        I must therefore: 1) force myself to ‘call’ them from time to time, find the energy to do so, combat my—telephonic (among other kinds)—apathy; 2) ask them to understand that above all they must let me call them. If they less often, less systematically, got in touch with me, that would mean for me that I must get in touch with them.”

Roland Barthes

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“I must slough off people—too many connections, too many people, too many entanglements. But it will take all the time just saying no. I don’t help them, they don’t help me. It’s just bitter useless waste of lives, time, soul—everything.”

Anne Morrow Lindbergh

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“I do think that socializing on the Internet is to socializing what reality TV is to reality.”

Aaron Sorkin

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“Sharing a beer on the porch is not something a New Orleanian must schedule two weeks in advance.”

Dan Baum

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“He arrived, unfortunately, in time for lunch, and by the end of the meal, without really trying, he had succeeded in alienating everybody including the dogs. It was in its way quite a tour de force to be able to irritate and insult five people of such different character with such ease and, apparently, without even being aware of doing it, inside two hours of arrival at a new locale.”

Gerald Durrell

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