Other forms of authority, in the real world, seem so much more dignified and consequential than writing fiction.
With an economist's precision, he calculates that this decline in investment has reduced growth since 1965 by 0.21 percentage points a year — "a consequential difference," he writes, of about $1.1 trillion in lost output.
When Michael spoke to an annual gathering of military reporters in November 2010, he got few congratulations for writing unquestionably the most consequential piece of war reporting that year, and a lot of hostility instead.
Finally, he demonstrates that he really doesn't get it by writing that President Obama's most consequential decisions will be those he makes as commander in chief.
It's possible to see in "The Angel's Game" the occasional gesture of Ruiz Zafón toward putting his own inner Ignatius B. Samson behind him and writing something a little less frivolous, more consequential.
Some of our most consequential American poets have written from the experience of illness, from medicine.
"His book is at once well intentioned and scornful, earnest and breezy, consequential and frivolous," Patricia Nelson Limerick wrote in these pages last year.
"My life of learning has been largely shaped by a long series of chance encounters and consequential choices," he has written.
The problem with attempting to write a consequential book about "the problem that has no name," which ambitious feminist writers try to do every few years, is that often the problem under consideration is a touch more trivial than the one Friedan took on.
He had a hand in writing those songs, among others, and they remain his signature contribution, even though he has done much else since, including consequential work with Van Morrison and a handful of the brighter stars of West African music.
