We have reached the point where ignorance and neglect are the best we can hope for in a ruler.

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.

It's time to live with what we have and mourn what we lost.

I went to college at Harvard, then did three years of graduate school at Yale. At both places I studied comparative literature. People find it odd that I went to both Harvard and Yale, and I guess it is odd, but that's just what people did where I grew up.

Read everything. If you haven't read everything, you'll never be able to write anything.

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.

It turns out that there is something that can compete with free: easy.