Sometimes I'll spend an hour writing a tiny email. I work on it until I've created the illusion that I've dashed it off in three minutes. If I make a typo, I let it stand. Sometimes in fact I correct the typo without thinking, and then I back up and retype the typo so that it'll look more casual. I don't know why.

It's troubling to see how often Winston Churchill is a proponent of massive programs that are really aimed at civilians - starvation blockades and chemical warfare stockpiles and so on.

There's something paralyzing about being a writer that you have to escape. I don't want to think of myself as a guy who's written a bunch of books. The 26 letters distance us from our own hesitations and they make us sound as if we know what we're doing. We know grammar, we know prose, but actually we're all just struggling in the dark, really.

I wanted my first novel to be a veritable infarct of narrative cloggers-the trick being to feel your way through each clog by blowing it up until its obstructiveness finally reveals not blank mass but unlooked-for seepage points of passage.

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.

I really practiced hard and got to a certain level of technical proficiency. I overcame some of my limitations. I was a hard-working, dedicated bassoonist, but I have to say I'm not a natural musician.

I prefer reading e-books on a high resolution LCD screen - like the iPod Touch's - although the pixel density could and should be much higher.