Short forms are returning online. Interactivity is coming back; it was always there in oral storytelling. Each form has its pluses and its minuses.

We yearned for the future. How did we learn it, that talent for insatiability?

The male frog in mating season," said Crake, "makes as much noise as it can. The females are attracted to the male frog with the biggest, deepest voice because it suggests a more powerful frog, one with superior genes. Small male frogs—it's been documented—discover if they position themselves in empty drainpipes, the pipe acts as a voice amplifier and the small frog appears much larger than it really is." So?" So that's what art is for the artist, an empty drainpipe. An amplifier. A stab at getting laid.

I'm from the generation that had the boys' door and the girls' door when you went to school, and you got in big trouble if you went in the wrong one.

I am too old to have ever been very worried about what "genre" any given book of mine might be. I read everything. I am easily amused.

But I began then to think of time as having a shape, something you could see, like a series of liquid transparencies, one laid on top of another.

My brother and I were both good at science, and we were both good at English literature. Either one of us could have gone either way.