Wikipedia flourished partly because it was a shrine to altruism.
I'm often called obsessive, but I don't think I am any more than anyone else.
I've always thought of myself as shy.
You can register a political objection in a number of ways.
Many good poets are really essayists who write very short essays.
I keep thinking I'll enjoy suspense novels, and sometimes I do. I've read about 20 Dick Francis novels.
I was very shy and somewhat awkward. I studied too hard. And to have this exciting dorm life was a whole new thing.
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.
I don't do all that well in the writerly world. I'm happier being outside the flow.
Shoes are the first adult machines we are given to master.
For me, as a beginning novelist, all other living writers form a control group for whom the world is a placebo.
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.
Rarely do pens go dry in restaurants.
I no longer want to live in an apartment furnished with forklifts and backhoes.
Haven't you felt a peculiar sort of worry about the chair in your living room that no one sits in?
Spoon the sauce over the ice cream. It will harden. This is what you have been working for.
When I really want to be soothed and reminded of why people bother to fiddle with sentences, I often read poetry.
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.
