The job of the novel is to be true to the confusion, but not so confusing that you turn the reader off.

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.

You can tell it's a poem because it's swimming in a little gel pack of white space. That shows it's a poem.

I did not know that the planning for biological and chemical warfare was so widespread in England, and even in France before France fell. It was news to me that there had been talk, even in the First World War, of dropping Colorado beetles on German potato crops and that kind of thing.

E.B. White's essays are the best things I've read about Maine - especially the one in which he's not sure if he can go out sailing any more in his sloop.

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.

Friends, both the imaginary ones you build for yourself out of phrases taken from a living writer, or real ones from college, and relatives, despite all the waste of ceremony and fakery and the fact that out of an hour of conversation you may have only five minutes in which the old entente reappears, are the only real means for foreign ideas to enter your brain.