I had a Viking sense of entitlement to whatever provisions I could plunder.

And Silence of the Lambs is a really smart book.

I voluntarily inflicted a certain level of insanity on myself.

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

It took hours to turn the clock back 30 seconds.

It offended his sense of himself, because he was an individual from an age of individuals, and a string of lights was, like him, an individual thing. No matter how little the thing had cost, to throw it away was to deny its value.

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.