Reporting provides reminders that things are always more complicated than you think.

I think empathy is a guy who punches you in the face at a bus station, and you're somehow able to look at that him and know enough about what situation he was in to know that he had to do that and not to hit back. That's empathy, and nothing ever happens in writing that has that kind of moral heroism about it.

This is why you can never reason true Christians out of the faith. It's not, as the adage has it, because they were never reasoned into it - many were - it's that faith is a logical door which locks behind you. What looks like a line of thought is steadily warping.

I'm just saying, take courage. That and pretty much that alone is never the incorrect thing to do.

We live in such constant nearness to the abyss of past time that the moment is endlessly sucked into.

The justification for rap rock seems to be that if you take really bad rock and put really bad rap over it, the result is somehow good, provided the raps are barked by an overweight white guy with cropped hair and forearm tattoos.

At GQ, there was never a temptation to pander or preach to the choir because I had no concept of who the reader was or what that reader might want.

It is a curious fact that the word essayist showed up in English before it existed in French.

The city of Cork - the urban center, where all the shops and bars and everything are - is actually an island, a river island.

Not watching TV gets me in a lot of trouble in my household because my wife and daughter have a lot of shows they like to watch.

What’s old doesn’t need to be old-fashioned. It gets reborn.

Ireland starts for me with the end of The Dead, which my father read to me from his desk in his basement office in New Albany, Ind.