Date: January 17, 2017

"A man who mocks John McCain, denounces Gold Star parents, snarls at an actor who spoofs him, and makes fun of a crippled reporter is someone whose core is empty, and whose need for approbation is unlimited because the void within him is so complete."

— Cohen, Eliot A. (b. 1956)

Date: January 17, 2017

"It not only gets the steel ball rolling onto the intestines, but also activates the senses, setting them to the frequencies at which the signals of new dangers can be received. Those signals appear as noise to the previous -- pre-war -- mind, as a breakdown in communication."

— Hemon, Aleksandr (b. 1964)

Date: January 17, 2017

"The new mind, which the body floods with adrenaline, begins -- like a rabbit in a forest of foxes -- to decode all the signals, even if it's not capable of fitting them into any narrative."

— Hemon, Aleksandr (b. 1964)

Date: January 12, 2017

"It opened a door in my mind, and behind that door I found the room where I wanted to spend the rest of my life."

— Auster, Paul (b. February 3, 1947)

Date: May 15, 2017

"We've got this perverse situation in which the vast analytic powers of the entire world are being spent trying to understand a guy whose thoughts are often just six fireflies beeping randomly in a jar."

— Brooks, David (b. 1961)

Date: June 14, 2017

"Sadly I fear that Shakespeare's 'Crassus,' now showing in the theater of my imagination, might be just as controversial as the new "Julius Caesar" were it staged as an evocation of the Trump era, since it would end with its slain-by-Parthians Crassus having molten gold, a symbol of his avarice, ...

— Douthat, Ross (b. November 28, 1979)

Date: July 26, 2017

"But he is nonetheless clearly impaired, gravely deficient somewhere at the intersection of reason and judgment and conscience and self-control."

— Douthat, Ross (b. November 28, 1979)

Date: July 31, 2017

"Character is like concrete: You can make an impression when it's freshly poured, in its youth, one could say, but when it sets, it's impervious to alteration."

— Blow, Charles (b. 1970)

Date: September/October, 2017

"Is 'American ideas' one of those phrases, like 'how women are' or 'the will of the West to survive' that are to thinking as huffing gasoline is to breathing?"

— Purdy, Jedediah (b. 1974)

Date: September 11, 2017

"It was 'The Cantos of Ezra Pound' that showed Bidart what a poem could be: unlimited in scope, mind-blowing in its dance with the mind."

— Als, Hilton (b. 1960)