A certain kind of person in America loves to note that they're currently soldiering through the latest Pulitzer winner for history, in particular. It connotes a certain gravitas, a connectedness to the literary and intellectual scene that most upwardly mobile professionals in America still desire.

We are reminded repeatedly, often by older men, that western civilization has died on the altar of social media.

There are, of course, fat characters in books out there, some of them quite enduring and famous. But they tend to be creatures of young-adult or commercial fiction.

It is no secret, of course, that people have strong feelings about fat - feelings that seem only to have been inflamed by the sense, in western countries, that there is an obesity crisis afoot. Concerns about health have mutated into a kind of panic attending any mention of fat people at all.

Indeed, there has never been any sort of organised movement of people who take their cats into the outdoors. Of course, the navy often took them on ships, but there they performed a function, mousing for the officers.

Novelists do not swing on the same pendulums as critics.

A presidential candidate changing churches is hardly unusual. Jeb Bush, Scott Walker, and Rand Paul have all aligned themselves with different faiths throughout their lives.

Self-publishing has been a dubious challenge to traditional publishers, at best.

Saying that you spend Christmas alone is, to most middle-class Americans, akin to confessing a terminal illness.

My parents and I - I'm an only child - are not particularly religious, but I was christened and raised in that vague and characteristically Canadian form of Protestantism known as the United Church.

Writing a novel about feminism can be a thankless task.

Feminists are disappointed in each other a lot, a natural side effect of being involved in a movement, which naturally implies that progress toward the ultimate goal is the only measure of success and that setbacks are always disasters.

Great novels are maps of complication, leading nowhere in particular, taking stances only provisionally and obliquely, happy to be tangled and to lack as many answers as the people they seek to depict.

We do learn a thing or two from art. It may not be the one-to-one instruction of a moral lesson or the rote learning of a grammatical rule or mathematical concept. But the habits of mind art cultivates are important.

Even the best novelists are rarely congratulated on the quality of their observations about contemporary life.

Podcast listening carries with it a faint aura of cultural snobbery, a notion that to cue up an episode is to do something highbrow and personally enriching, whether it's a history lecture broadcast from a university or an amateur talk show recorded in someone's garage.

A lot of people produce podcasts in which they simply ramble on for hours about themselves and their lives. There is something very poignant about the volume of human desire to be heard out there in the Wild West of podcasts.

The desire to abdicate, to give up - for me, that's primal.

A good novelist pays attention to his characters. A good biographer pays attention to the documents before her. A good critic pays close attention to the thing she's brought to evaluate.

Telling a story about someone has enormous power. People forget a headline. They remember a story.

Peak TV has resulted in beautiful shows that have nothing in particular to tell us about humanity.

The alienated man lashing out at society is a trope that popular culture loves to explore.

For a long time now, movie characters have generally been articulate, even chatty. Call it the influence of Woody Allen, but we have become used to characters who are well able to explain themselves to others.

Articulateness is not the only way that intelligence manifests itself.

There is an unfortunate side effect of being a person of few words: Sometimes people will assume you are less intelligent than you are.

It's become a cliche to say that a piece of drama is about 'the nature of truth.' But 'Rectify' so openly plays with the slippery nature of memory that the label directly applies.

Among journalists, there is a saying: 'If it bleeds, it leads.' This can result in some serious hustling - and some serious sloppiness - whenever a crime occurs. The public's longing to see and hear salacious details is, basically, endless.

There are many things to like about 'Mr. Robot,' the most ephemeral and yet memorable of them being the opening credits.

The real discovery of having your consciousness raised was never that you'd be handed tools; it was the discovery that the only real leverage you get in life is yourself.

Would we even recognize an Oliver Stone production if it didn't kick up the usual fuss?

Most academic historians accept that historians' own circumstances demand that they tell the story in a particular way, of course. While people wring their hands about 'revisionist' historians; on some level, the correction and amplification of various parts of the past is not 'revisionism' as it is simply the process of any historical writing.

Hillbilly stereotypes have always made it easier for middle-class whites to presume that racism is the exclusive province of 'that kind' of person.

Push the envelope too far as a female artist, and you may only earn an ocean of ink expressing concern for your delicate constitution, amounting to a caution against playing on traditionally male wavelengths.

Makeup is not a mask that covers up your beauty; it's a weapon that helps you express who you are from the inside.

Makeup is no different than clothes and accessories - it's embellishments for your face. And it also gives you creative freedom. You get to have that moment in front the mirror every morning and give yourself self-love. You're making yourself up beautiful, which is essentially self-love.

Whatever happens, I'll just keep moving forward. Like an avalanche.

Success is like a lightning bolt. It'll strike you when you least expect it, and you just have to keep the momentum going. You have to strike when the iron is hot. So for me, I just kept striking and striking to polish out the sword that I was making.

I know I'm a storyteller at heart, and if there's a platform that needs stories, I'm going be there.

The beauty of the Internet is there's a niche market for everything, and if you can focus on it, you can build a sustainable and viable business of it.

Seven years ago, in my first semester at college, the professors handed out MacBook Pros. With mine, I filmed a seven-minute tutorial on 'natural makeup' - just me, my laptop, and a cup of coffee. When, a week later, it clocked 40,000 Web views, I knew people were connecting with it, so I kept going. That moment changed my life.

When you're eating a bowl of pho, you're eating everything you need.

I'm a total nerd, so I'm on my telescope, or I read a lot. I'm very inspired by ancient history.

I use sunscreen every single day, even if I'm not going outside in the sun, because I'm near a window. I can always get those UV rays on my face, so I always apply sunscreen on my face and neck. It's like brushing my teeth: I feel weird if I don't apply sunscreen.

Growing up, before my mom would cook our rice, she would rinse the rice out and pour it out three times. And after the fourth pour, she'd pour it into a little bowl, and she'd rinse her face with that. It's known to help whiten the skin and nourish it because essentially inside the water you have all the essential nutrients from the rice.

What inspired me to work so hard and to maintain my determination was seeing my mother. She was an immigrant and was struggling in America to make it by; that inspired me to work hard.

I believe if religion brings you to a sense of peace, that's beautiful. But I also believe if religion's not your thing, that's fine, too, just so long as you're a good person and you find that one thing that leads you to peace and teaches you to have harmony with yourself and other people around you.

Every day is different. I am constantly creating, whether that be for my own YouTube channel and social networks or my businesses like FAWN (For all Women's Network) - a women's lifestyle network on YouTube that I founded/produce; em michelle phan (my cosmetics line with L'Oreal); or Ipsy (a beauty sampling service I co-founded in 2011).

You know when you're a child and your imagination is limitless and you really believe in magic? I thought I had super powers.

I listen to a lot of Tibetan music before I sleep. I'll just type in 'Tibetan meditation music' on YouTube, and within 15 minutes, it knocks me out. I sleep like a baby.

That's the beauty about beauty; it's not like a tattoo. You can just wash it right off, and your skin is your canvas, so you can do something new the next day.