Daniel Levitin takes the most sophisticated ideas that exist about the brain and mind, applies them to the most emotionally direct art we have, our songs, and makes beautiful music of the two together.

I don't miss the obligation to be opinionated, but I do regret the chance to share a joy.

Writing is the process of finding something to distract you from writing, and of all the helpful distractions - adultery, alcohol and acedia, all of which aided our writing fathers - none can equal the Internet.

After all, spinning is its own reward. There wouldn't be carousels if it weren't so.

In bookstores, my stuff is usually filed in the out-of-the-way, additional interest sections.

There are as many attitudes to cooking as there are people cooking, of course, but I do think that cooking guys tend - I am a guilty party here - to take, or get, undue credit for domestic virtue, when in truth cooking is the most painless and, in its ways, ostentatious of the domestic chores.

The special virtue of freedom is not that it makes you richer and more powerful but that it gives you more time to understand what it means to be alive.