To me, the point of a novel is to take you to a still place. You can multitask with a lot of things, but you can’t really multitask reading a book.

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.

The personality susceptible to the dream of limitless freedom is a personality also prone, should the dream ever sour, to misanthropy and rage.

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

The reader is a friend, not an adversary, not a spectator.

The more you pursue distractions, the less effective any particular distraction is, and so I'd had to up various dosages, until, before I knew it, I was checking my e-mail every ten minutes, and my plugs of tobacco were getting ever larger, and my two drinks a night had worsened to four, and I'd achieved such deep mastery of computer solitaire that my goal was no longer to win a game but to win two or more games in a row--a kind of meta-solitaire whose fascination consisted not in playing the cards but in surfing the streaks of wins and losses.

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.