But the day I can't shrug off a twinge of self-pity, is the day I'm washed up for keeps.

I work on a laptop specifically so I can work in cafes and pretend I'm part of the human world.

The past is still visible. The buildings haven't changed, the layout of the streets hasn't changed. So memory is very available to me as I walk around.

For those whose ganglia were formed pre-TV, the mimetic deployment of pop-culture icons seems at best an annoying tic and at worst a dangerous vapidity that compromises fiction's seriousness by dating it out of the Platonic Always, where it ought to reside.

One of the things that novels have tended not to concentrate on over the centuries is the fact that people read books.

Nerds are just deep, and neurotic, fans. Needy fans. We're all nerds, on one subject or another.

It wasn't for children, seventh grade. You could read the stress of even entering the building in the postures of the teachers, the security guards. Nobody could relax in such a racial and hormonal disaster area.