"We're burdened by the need to be cool. When I was in college, I read Kafka and Camus and tried to write like them, in flat non-American English, as if written under the influence of a migraine, until it slowly dawned on me that I was missing the basic experiences that had formed them. Enduring high school is not the same as growing up Jewish in Prague or fighting in the French Resistance. I had no solid basis for being cool in that existential motorcycle James Dean absurdist chain-smoking hero sort of way, so I gave up being cool and settled for being pleasant."
Garrison Keillor