It's an engrossing look at the way the flow of information shapes history-as well as a rare glimpse into the soul of the hardcore geek

Becoming an author changes your attitude too. Once you see where books come from, and how they're made, they never seem quite as sacred again.

The paradox of the English country house is that its state of permanent decline, the fact that its heyday is always behind it, is part of the seduction, just as it is part of the seduction of books in general.

Every year the literary press praises dozens if not hundreds of novels to the skies, asserting explicitly or implicitly that these books will probably not be suffering water damage in the basements of their authors' houses 20 years from now. But historically, anyway, that's not the way the novelistic ecology works.

A novel with a bad middle is a bad book. A bad ending is something I've just gotten in the habit of forgiving.

That’s what death did, it treated you like a child, like everything you had ever thought and done and cared about was just a child’s game, to be crumpled up and thrown away when it was over. It didn’t matter. Death didn’t respect you. Death thought you were bullshit, and it wanted to make sure you knew it.

The life I should be living had been mislaid through some clerical error by the cosmic bureaucracy.