But spending your life concentrating on death is like watching a whole movie and thinking only about the credits that are going to roll at the end. It’s a mistake of emphasis.

Wikipedia flourished partly because it was a shrine to altruism.

Haven’t you felt a peculiar sort of worry about the chair in your living room that no one sits in?

I think I am done with Wikipedia for the time being. But I have a secret hope. Someone recently proposed a Wikimorgue – a bin of broken dreams where all rejects could still be read,...

Shoes are the first adult machines we are given to master.

You can tell it’s a poem because it’s swimming in a little gel pack of white space. That shows it’s a poem.

E.B. White’s essays are the best things I’ve read about Maine – especially the one in which he’s not sure if he can go out sailing any more in his sloop.

Wikipedia is just an incredible thing. It is fact-encirclingly huge, and it is idiosyncratic, careful, messy, funny, shocking and full of simmering controversies – and it is free, and it is fast.

It’s true that I don’t rearrange that much in the fiction, but I feel if you change even one name or the order of one event then you have to call it fiction or you...

I’m often called obsessive, but I don’t think I am any more than anyone else.

Poetry is prose in slow motion.

So I really began as a failed poet – although when I first wanted to be a writer, I learned to write prose by reading poetry.

For me, as a beginning novelist, all other living writers form a control group for whom the world is a placebo.

Maybe the Kindle was the Bowflex of bookishness: something expensive that, when you commit to it, forces you to do more of whatever it is you think you should be doing more of.

You can register a political objection in a number of ways.

Who cares about my cock? It’ll fend for itself.

That was the problem with reading: you always had to pick up again at the very thing that had made you stop reading the day before.

I blush easily. I have difficulty meeting people’s eye, difficulty with public speaking, the normal afflictions of the shy, but not to a paralysing degree.

One’s head is finite. You pour more and more things into it – surnames, chronologies, affiliations – and it packs them away in its tunnels, and eventually you find that you have a book about...

Until a friend or relative has applied a particular proverb to your own life, or until you’ve watched him apply the proverb to his own life, it has no power to sway you.

There is no good word for stomach; just as there is no good word for girlfriend. Stomach is to girlfriend as belly is to lover, and as abdomen is to consort, and as middle is...

The music wasn’t going to happen, and I realized I had read so little. I didn’t know my way around any century. I was very under read.

First, if you love the Kindle and it works for you, it isn’t problematic, and you should ignore all my criticisms and read the way you want to read.

The great thing about novels is that you can be as unshy as you want to be. I’m very polite in person. I don’t want to talk about startling or upsetting things with people.

I don’t do all that well in the writerly world. I’m happier being outside the flow.

I don’t think that loneliness is necessarily a bad or unconstructive condition. My own skill at jamming time may actually be dependent on some fluid mixture of emotions, among them curiosity, sexual desire, and love,...

While I was writing I assumed it would be published under a pseudonym, and that liberated me: what I wrote was exactly what I wanted to read.

I’ve never been a fast reader. I’m fickle; I don’t finish books I start; I put a book aside for five, ten years and then take it up again.

I woke up thinking a very pleasant thought. There is lots left in the world to read.

I keep thinking I’ll enjoy suspense novels, and sometimes I do. I’ve read about 20 Dick Francis novels.

Will you dance for me? Let your breasts roam for a moment — I need to see how they dance.”Okay.’ She danced, and as she danced, she tried to think of the most delicious salads...

I ordered a Kindle 2 from Amazon. How could I not? There were banner ads for it all over the Web. Whenever I went to the Amazon Web site, I was urged to buy one.

I hadn’t played any music since freshman year of college, more than thirty years ago, so I had to relearn everything. I started writing songs. Some were dance and trance songs (I listen to them...

Why are things beautiful? I don´t know. That´s a good question. Isn´t it pleasing when you ask a question of a person, a teacher, or a speaker, and he or she says, That´s a good...

I no longer want to live in an apartment furnished with forklifts and backhoes.

The whole point of straws, I had thought, was that you did not have to set down the slice of pizza to suck a dose of Coke while reading a paperback.

The nice thing about a protest song is that it takes the complaint, the fussing, the finger-pointing, and gives it an added component of sociable harmony.

I like shelves full of books in a library, but if all books become electronic, the task of big research libraries remains the same – keep what’s published in the form in which it appeared.

I’ve always thought of myself as shy.

One day the English language is going to perish. The easy spokenness of it will perish and go black and crumbly — maybe — and it will become a language like Latin that learned people...

There’s a time and place for the Kindle, and I own one now and have books on it that I don’t otherwise have. But I don’t find that my hand reaches out for it the...

When I really want to be soothed and reminded of why people bother to fiddle with sentences, I often read poetry.

Many good poets are really essayists who write very short essays.

I was very shy and somewhat awkward. I studied too hard. And to have this exciting dorm life was a whole new thing.

True, the name of the product wasn’t so great. Kindle? It was cute and sinister at the same time – worse than Edsel, or Probe, or Microsoft’s Bob. But one forgives a bad name. One...

Printed books usually outlive bookstores and the publishers who brought them out. They sit around, demanding nothing, for decades. That’s one of their nicest qualities – their brute persistence.

Rarely do pens go dry in restaurants.

Spoon the sauce over the ice cream. It will harden. This is what you have been working for.

From my music training, I knew that, some Spanish rhythms apart, 5/4 is a time signature used only in the modern era. Holst’s Mars from the Planets is 5/4. But if you speak lines of...

I really practiced hard and got to a certain level of technical proficiency. I overcame some of my limitations. I was a hard-working, dedicated bassoonist, but I have to say I’m not a natural musician.