Three-dimensional results are important to me. I did once spend some time just writing, and floating around, and I lost my mind a little bit. I wasn't so good at that.

One might think that a boy who was out in the snow for so long would get cold, but Max was not. He was warm, partly because he had on many layers, and partly because boys who are part wolf and part wind do not get cold.

She pulls away, pats me on the shoulder with three mini-pats, like those used to pet reptiles.

The air is like being wanted, we say, and they nod approvingly. The air is like getting older, they say, and they touch our arms gently.

Tim O'Brien's book about Vietnam, The Things They Carried, has won every award, is studied in college and is considered to be definitive. But it's fiction.

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.

Paper is a uniquely beautiful format, more so than the web, I think: you need to invest in the aesthetics.