Birds were like dinosaurs' better selves. They had short lives and long summers. We all should be so lucky as to leave behind such heirs.

Without privacy there was no point in being an individual.

Readers and writers are united in their need for solitude, in their pursuit of substance in a time of ever-increasing evanescence: in their reach inward, via print, for a way out of loneliness.

It seems to me self-evident that if you have a life, things happen in it, and certain things do change; certain things end. People you know die.

I really enjoy doing both, but I didn't write nonfiction until 1994.

Good novels are produced by people who voluntarily isolate themselves and go deep, and report from the depths on what they find.

Remind me again what's wrong with Dave Matthews?" "Basically everything, except technical proficiency," Walter said. "Right." "But maybe especially the banality of the lyrics. 'Gotta be free, so free, yeah, yeah, yeah. Can't live without my freedom, yeah yeah.' That's pretty much every song.