I’ve always thought of myself as shy.

Wikipedia flourished partly because it was a shrine to altruism.

I'm often called obsessive, but I don't think I am any more than anyone else.

Sometimes, despite the fact that you're reading through masses of material, you just can't not think about a certain event, for it seems to capture the reality of the entire situation so much better than any set of statistics.

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.

Maybe the Kindle was the Bowflex of bookishness: something expensive that, when you commit to it, forces you to do more of whatever it is you think you should be doing more of.

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