Whispering makes a narrow place narrower.

I completely love music. I used to be the music critic at 'The Improper Bostonian.' It's just something I've always loved very deeply.

I've always enjoyed that kind of thing - thinking about the production of narrative and why it is that when we read a novel, we don't notice the fact that someone who might be very close-mouthed or tight-lipped is perfectly willing to tell us a story in 600 or 700 pages.

I don't know when they first had feeds. Like maybe, fifty or a hundred years ago. Before that, they had to use their hands and their eyes. Computers were all outside the body. They carried them around outside of them, in their hands, like if you carried your lungs in a briefcase and opened it to breathe.

Its a very 18th-century thing to have a book broken into several volumes.

One of the series I like is D.M. Cornish's 'Monster Blood Tattoo,' in which he creates a whole language. Kids who are reading that are building a language in their heads. There's no real cognitive difference. I think kids are excited by language, and they're not always given credit for that.

And I realize that the decision to be human is not one single instant, but is a thousand choices made very day. It is choices we make every second and requires constant vigilance. We have to fight to remain human.