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.

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.

Everything he did was at least partial and often total bullshit” (402).

Robin turned and looked straight into her. "What's life for?" "I don't know." "I don't either. But I don't think it's about winning.

I was about 13, in some ways, when I wrote the first book. Approximately 18 when I wrote the second.

It's very liberating for me to realize that I don't have to step up to the plate with a plot that involves the U.N. Security Council.

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