Negative? Moi? I think realistic might be a better word. You mean to tell me we can drive all the way here from L.A. and see maybe ten thousand square miles of shopping malls, and you don't have maybe just the weentsiest inkling that something, somewhere has gone very very cuckoo?

I think writing would have happened to me anyway, somehow. Differently, but it still would have happened.

It's not healthy to live life as a succession of isolated little cool moments.

Canadians can easily 'pass for American' as long as we don't accidentally use metric measurements or apologize when hit by a car.

If I think too much about all of those Chinese factories where all the stuff in a Wal-Mart is made, I get that woozy feeling you get when you see ducks covered in crude oil.

Making eye contact with adults while dressed as a clown is risky.

As I'm never going to be old, I'm glad that I never lost my sense of wonder about the world, although I have a hunch it would have happened pretty soon. I loved the world, its beauty and bigness as well as its smallness.