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.

Every time my brain parks the car neatly in the driveway, my mouth drives through the back of the garage.

I'm an amateur science enthusiast. I'm not even a professional enthusiast. I don't know anything; I never even passed biology in high school. But I read the science section of the newspaper.

You know, it's been proven that 35 to 40 hours a year with one-on-one attention, a student can get one grade level higher

I've never had WiFi at home. I'm too easily distracted, and YouTube is too tempting.

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.