If your hand doesn't work for it, your heart doesn't feel sorry for it.

Why do we pursue information that we know will never leave our heads?

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.

How had this happened? Everyone in the world knew more than us, about everything, and this I hated then found hugely comforting.

He remained, weeks after awakening, in that period of early-morning consciousness that allows easy re-entry to dreaming. His limbs still tingled with the residue of sleep, and most days he wanted badly to allow it to overtake him again.

We would oppose the turning of the planet and refuse the setting of the sun.

I don't mean to beat a made-in-America drum, but I would be lying if I said it doesn't feel somehow right to be printing books in the U.S.