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.

When I really want to be soothed and reminded of why people bother to fiddle with sentences, I often read poetry.

So what rhyming poems do is they take all these nearby sound curves and remind you that they first existed that way in your brain. Before they meant something specific, they had a shape and a way of being said. And now, yes, gloom and broom are floating fifty miles away from each other in you mind because they refer to different notions, but they're cheek-by-jowl as far as your tongue is concerned. And that's what a poem does. Poems match sounds up the way you matched them when you were a tiny kid, using that detachable front phoneme.

Books: a beautifully browsable invention that needs no electricity and exists in a readable form no matter what happens.

Wikipedia flourished partly because it was a shrine to altruism.

I ordered a Kindle 2 from Amazon. How could I not? There were banner ads for it all over the Web. Whenever I went to the Amazon Web site, I was urged to buy one.

I certainly felt I had an idea of World War II, and it's probably the idea that many people share: there was this insane aggressor, and there was really only one way to proceed in resisting him. What I didn't realize is that there were many voices belonging to reasonable, interesting, complicated people who had a different way of interpreting the possible responses to the Hitlerian menace.