Today's Baudelaires are hip-hop artists.

The problem with making a virtual world of oneself is akin to the problem with projecting ourselves onto a cyberworld: there’s no end of virtual spaces in which to seek stimulation, but their very endlessness, the perpetual stimulation without satisfaction, becomes imprisoning.

Fiction is a particularly effective way for strangers to connect across time and distance

she was so much a personality and so little anything else that even staring straight at her he had no idea what she really looked like.

Since our technology is really just an extension of ourselves, we don’t have to have contempt for its manipulability in the way we might with actual people. It’s all one big endless loop. We like the mirror and the mirror likes us. To friend a person is merely to include the person in our private hall of flattering mirrors.

For every reader who dies today, a viewer is born, and we seem to be witnessing . . . the final tipping balance.

I hate that word dysfunction.