Once you're out in a place where there's one sheriff for the county, people have to learn how to get along with each other and that means going to the dump illegally and dumping your garbage and hoping the guys don't call you on it and being terrified of this to your core until you realize after many years that the guys at the dump don't really care where your garbage is coming from.

Only the nerds will save the earth.

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.

I'm an older, wall-eyed, overweight, tweedy writer who has been lucky enough to be asked to play various iterations of himself in a certain realm of popular cultutre. That gives me great joy and excitement, but I don't go to the media saying, "And I'm also the world's greatest actor."

Anyone of conscience could come look at my book and see it as an esoteric oddity or be intrigued by it. It could happen either way on a thousand different little decisions each individual might make.

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.

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.