He’d developed a strangely tender feeling towards such words, as if they were children abandoned in the woods and it was his duty to rescue them.

Sometimes reactions can be quite surprising: readers like things that you, the author, feel you've barely gotten away with; or they dislike one of the parts you secretly think is one of your little gems.

When people in my generation started to write, we did not actually have much of a movie industry, much of a theater scene, much of a television industry or other creative outlets. But we had a lot of aspiring writers. All that has changed. We now have a movie industry, television industry and lots of theater. But we have retained a large contingent of writers and a dedicated readership. The larger number of people in society who value writing, the larger number of good writers will be produced. That's my belief. It raises the bar.

History, as I recall, was never this winsome, and especially not this clean, but the real thing would never sell: most people prefer a past in which nothing smells.

I particularly like Twitter, because it's short and can be very funny and informative. It's a little bit like having your own radio program.

As Charles Darwin said,'The economy shown by Nature in her resources is striking,'' says the Spirit. 'All wealth comes from Nature. Without it, there wouldn't be any economics. The primary wealth is food, not money. Therefore anything that concerns the handling of the land also concerns me.

Our biggest technology that we ever, ever invented was articulated language with built-out grammar. It is that that allows us to imagine things far in the future and things way back in the past.