I no longer want to live in an apartment furnished with forklifts and backhoes.

In the novel, I can change things and simplify, and make events work towards whatever meanings I'm trying to get at more efficiently.

The question any novel is really trying to answer is, Is life worth living?

Printed books usually outlive bookstores and the publishers who brought them out. They sit around, demanding nothing, for decades. That's one of their nicest qualities - their brute persistence.

Wikipedia flourished partly because it was a shrine to altruism.

I blush easily. I have difficulty meeting people's eye, difficulty with public speaking, the normal afflictions of the shy, but not to a paralysing degree.

The equivocations, the confusions, the contradictions. There's no way we can live through or comprehend something so big that happened so long ago. We've lost true history. But if we are willing to tolerate the contradictions, and if we suffer through events rather than ticking them off, we may at least get closer to understanding what happened than if we grip the handrail of a carefully polished and reassuringly heroic narrative.