I get enjoyment out of writing, but I get absolutely no enjoyment out of rewriting, so I don't do much of it. The more you work on something, certainly, the better it gets. But there's also a pretty clear law of diminishing returns. It drives me crazy to do readings of my books, because if I read anything I've written in the past, I'd like to almost rewrite everything.

The essays are very solipsistic and self-absorbed, I'm totally conscious of that. To me, book writing is fun, and I basically just write about things that are entertaining to myself.

In and of itself, nothing really matters. What matters is that nothing is ever in and of itself.

The essays are different because ultimately it's things I'm interested in, and I'm really just writing about myself and using those subjects as a prism.

I think that most technology is positive in the short term, and negative in the long term. I wonder, if somebody looked back at the 20th and 21st centuries a thousand years from now, what their perception of the car would be. Or of television. I wonder if over time, they'll be seen as this thing that drove the culture, but ultimately had more downside than upside.

It doesn't matter what you can do if you don't know why you're doing it.

If I'm around spiders, my fear isn't so much the spider, but my fear is that I'm somewhere rustic and that spiders are crawling around. I must be in the woods.