Date: May 18, 2015

"'I have to be totally still.' Ideas come floating up 'like a bubble in liquid.' At that point, he goes into an excitable motor state, pacing or scribbling down ideas."

— Colapinto, John (b. 1958)

Date: January 3, 2016

"It is popular among these people who apparently have brains wired like short-wave radios broadcasting from upper Michigan to say that the real constitutional authority in this country resides in its local sheriffs."

— Pierce, Charles P. (b. 1953)

Date: January 14, 2016

"Then there's the risible campaign commercial in which the Tailgunner dresses up in camo and face paint and hangs out in the blind with the Duck Dynasty crew, looking like a G.I. Joe who's lost his kung-fu grip on his senses."

— Pierce, Charles P. (b. 1953)

Date: February 1, 2016

"Sharing videos, binge-watching Netflix, the resultant neuro-pudding at the end of an epic gaming marathon, the perverse seduction of recording and devouring our most ordinary human thoughts on Facebook and Instagram -- Wallace somehow knew all this was coming, and (as the man himself might have ...

— Bissell, Tom (b. 1974)

Date: February 1, 2016

"Which is to say that a novel is perishable only by virtue of being stored in such a leaky cask: our heads."

— Bissell, Tom (b. 1974)

Date: February 1, 2016

"I read for hours that way, morning after morning, my mind awhirl."

— Bissell, Tom (b. 1974)

Date: February 9, 2016

"There is something deeply disturbing in his [Ted Cruz's] disassociation, a lack of empathy which suggests a barren inner landscape."

— Patterson, Richard North (b. 1947)

Date: April 18, 2016

"We begin to esteem this way of being at its true worth when we realize that the creators of the brain food that we're wolfing down are at least as involved in it, at the level of imagination, as we are."

— James, Clive (b. 1939)

Date: April 18, 2016

"A TV habit on this scale starts to permeate every corner of your mind."

— James, Clive (b. 1939)

Date: April 18, 2016

"The new mythology gets into the old mythology, as if classic literature had faded into the mind's background and images encountered on the screen had become one's first frame of cultural reference."

— James, Clive (b. 1939)