My memories of literary agenting are of a very happy time and there are surprising reminders of it coming back now.

Life may be miraculous in its unlikelihood in the universe, but it would be a fallacy to suggest that its rareness makes it inextinguishable.

The reality is that if you want to be in a reality-based community, you've got to respect reality and that means calling it bad when you see the past ahead and it doesn't look good and acknowledging when it's going to work.

So I am a product of the Internet, and to some degree a product of this sensibility of constant cultural reference.

Everything we make in life, eventually, is sold for a dollar or a penny or given away.

I have no skills. I mean, I can make jokes, I'm pretty good at talking to people on the Judge John Hodgman podcast. I can figure out what makes a pretty good story, and I can make eggs really well.

There is no metaphor for death. All comparisons are odious, but I'll do one anyway. We all have these moments of harsh clarity where we realize that something is gone, whether that is youth, whether that is someone we care about, whether that is where we literally lose someone we care about to death. Or we end a relationship that we thought would last forever, or have one ended for us. We all have these moments in life where it seems impossible to fill up the time that we have left for us, and yet we have to do it somehow.