It seems as though our ability to change technology happens so quickly, and our ability to evolve as creatures is still very slow.

When I'm walking around, I'm usually drinking pop, so I can't have a mask on. That's why I couldn't be a surgeon.

We are often wrong about the past, but at least with the past you can change your thinking. We can't do that with the future.

In the eight years I worked at newspapers, even during a little stretch when I was a film critic, I was never, ever doing exclusively criticism. In the daily newspaper world, much more value is placed on reporting than on thinking abstractly about art. The eight years I was in newspapers, I was mainly a journalist in the conventional sense, and just doing criticism when there were opportunities.

I think anyone who's not as good a writer as me is absolutely a hack, and I think anybody who's a slightly better writer than me is brilliant. So of course that makes me a horrible critic when it comes to books, because I can't distance my own experience from what I'm doing.

It is important to have questionable friends you can trust unconditionally.

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.