It would be awesome to be so impressive that we could sway people to our way of thinking just by declaiming our thoughts, but probably most of us lack such gravitas. Luckily, there's something even better: evidence, logic, and argument.

The strangest thing about the low quality of Internet argument is that effective argument isn't really so difficult. Sure, not everyone can be Clarence Darrow, but anyone who wants to be at least competent at argument can do it.

I make a good living selling hardback books through paper publishers, and I have many friends in the industry who will suffer as it changes, so on a personal level, the transition to digital isn't something I welcome wholeheartedly.

Paper publishers are doing everything they can to slow the transition to eBooks because, in a digital world, paper publishers' high hardback margins essentially disappear.

After I sold my screenplay adaptation of 'Rain Fall' to Sony Pictures, I had no more creative involvement.

Good argument is intended to persuade another.

In my unfortunately infrequent encounters with real passion, I’m rarely as careful as I ought to be. The rationalization goes something like: With all the bullets and mortar rounds I’ve survived, I must be immune to sexually transmitted diseases. Stupid, I know. More likely, fate will indulge its taste for irony by killing me with AIDS os some other unpleasant alternative.

Think about it. Ever look in a closet or under the bed, when you’re alone in the house, to ensure an intruder isn’t hiding there? Now, if you really believed the Man in the Black Ski Mask was lurking in those places, would you behave the same way? Of course not. But it’s more comfortable to believe the danger only in the abstract, and to act on it only halfheartedly. That’s denial.

She remembered something her mother had told her when she was a teenager: “The boy you date is different from the boy you’re engaged to, the boy you’re engaged to is different from the man you marry, the man you marry is different from the father of your children.” She might have added, “And your ex-husband is going to be different than all of them, too.

If you wanted to understand the mentality of most Washington insiders, all you had to do was put yourself in the mind of an insecure teenager, at which point it all began to make sense.