Every good writer I know needs to go into some deep, quiet place to do work that is fully imagined. And what the Internet brings is lots of vulgar data. It is the antithesis of the imagination. It leaves nothing to the imagination.

This evening I begin a notebook. If anyone reads this, I trust they will forgive my overuse of "I". I can't stop it. I'm writing this.

Use well thy freedom.

The world was ending then, it's ending still, and I'm happy to belong to it again.

And Silence of the Lambs is a really smart book.

The problem was money and the indignities of life without it. Every stroller, cell phone, Yankees cap, and SUV he saw was a torment. He wasn't covetous, he wasn't envious. But without money he was hardly a man.

Reading enables me to maintain a sense of something substantive– my ethical integrity, my intellectual integrity.