By the way, if I have my own cult of personality with my own geodetic dome in western Massachusetts, I will have a hurt yurt for anyone who crosses me.

It seems that every generation needs its public, tweedy, literary personality to sell its consumer electronics. To whatever degree I can live up to the Plimptonian legacy, I am humble and proud.

I would be good for maybe not the center square but an upper square on 'Hollywood Squares.'

I'm not a particularly religious person, but that feeling of getting transmissions from someplace else, even if it's from your own consciousness, is very, very real. To me, at least.

I had some very, very fond memories of the people I worked with and the authors I worked with - and I won't mention any names - but as I have been traveling through rural Maine over the past few weeks, one of my favorite things to do is to go into bookstores on the side of rural routes and paw through the old copies of Tom Clancy and Trevanian books they have in there for weird old 1970s thrillers that I haven't read yet.

I am a marginally employed person who can escape with my school teacher wife to the waters of Maine for much of the summer.

Borges was unapologetically smart and equally sentimental; a proto-geek, blind to distinctions between low pulp fiction and high criticism, experimental but never arch, and always playful, with a humor as dry as dust.