WHEN we don't get the results we want in our military endeavors, we don't blame the soldiers.

He wanted to fly in lightweight contraptions with her.

We feel that to reveal embarrassing or private things, we have given someone something, that, like a primitive person fearing that a photographer will steal his soul, we identify our secrets, our past and their blotches, with our identity, that revealing our habits or losses or deeds somehow makes one less of oneself.

Writing is a deep-sea dive. You need hours just to get into it: down, down, down. If you're called back to the surface every couple of minutes by an email, you can't ever get back down. I have a great friend who became a Twitterer and he says he hasn't written anything for a year.

Maybe he was more than the sum of his broken parts.

Still though, I think if you're not self-obsessed, you're probably boring.

I need eight hours to get maybe 20 minutes of work done. I had one of those yesterday: seven hours of self-loathing.