“Ironically, the art form that opera has the most in common with is silent film.”

“Billymark’s was the kind of bar that allowed you to feel like maybe you could get it back.”

“I wanted to write my own Messiah.”

"Really I am just watching the movie of my childhood again."

“What was happiness, anyway, and what did it mean to narrate it?”

“A lot of people go to opera in this country to see operas they’ve heard all their lives and to cry in the same places where they usually cry.”

“There is no island of lost toys.”

“She’s so intelligent and so stylish and so creative, and so tapped into whatever the zeitgeist is.”

“That’s what it’s like for me, anyway; I can’t really say what it would be like for you.”

“You never know when you’re gonna need a watermelon.”

“Society doesn’t really make a lot of room for spinners anymore.”

“I gather up all that energy and I let myself feel it emotionally, too. And that’s when I start to draw.”

“I love opera not as an expert, or even as an informed connoisseur.”

“There are only two types of people in the world.”

“Is ‘Mississippi’ a love song?”

“‘Maybe you have a ghost,’ he suggested, before taking his leave.”

“Why were we here? Did we want to know if Didion had good taste?”

“Youth is so angst-filled. Youth is just all-angst-all-the-time.”

“I feel close to a lot of people in stupid technology ways.”

“Male viewers tend to see the painting in sexualized terms, while the humor is almost always picked up on by female viewers.”

Life is about taking a spin around the diamond with your best friends.

“Annie Ernaux manages to create what feels like a new tense—a literary time zone that can hold it all at once.”

“You were generous to me on a day when you had no reason to be. I wish I’d been kinder in return.”

  On the top floor of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, a printer is printing the news. As the printer groans and stutters, long loops of paper gather on the gallery floor. It prints slowly, pausing every few minutes, as the paper grows i…

  If you read police blotters enough, you start to notice the colors: Pink bike. A yellow color backpack. Silver four-door sedan. Heather-blue uniform pants. A black male wearing a black hat with white lettering, a navy blue coat, and blue jea…