Life is rarely about what happened; it's mostly about what we think happened.

Observing someone without context amplifies the experience. The more we know, the less we are able to feel.

Because I'm 44, I feel kind of lucky that I lived through this period where I started my career where there was no Internet at all, and now when I finish it, there will be nothing but the Internet.

It's possible for me to imagine a generation of people maybe two generations removed from you who might decide that we have an adversarial relationship with technology.

But no matter how many times we re-rank the presidents, in another 200 years, the top presidents will still be Washington and Lincoln and Jefferson, because they defined what a president is. They are the idea, and you can't be better than the idea.

The people who review my books, generally, are kind of youngish culture writers who aspire to write books. When someone writes a book review, they obviously already self-identify as a writer. I mean, they are. They're writers, they're critics, and they're writing about a book about a writer who's a critic. So I think it's really hard for people to distance themselves from what they're criticizing.

Let's face it: Sadness and evil are always more believable than happiness and love. When a movie reviewer calls a film "realistic," everyone knows what that means--it means the movie has an unhappy ending.