All the different ways we know the world all come from the brain, and they all depend on each other to make sense.

What I really like to learn how to do is to build sentences that are equal to mental states.

Time passes, as the novelist says. The single most useful trick of fiction for our repair and refreshment: the defeat of time. A century of family saga and a ride up an escalator can take the same number of pages. Fiction sets any conversion rate, then changes it in a syllable. The narrator’s mother carries her child up the stairs and the reader follows, for days. But World War I passes in a paragraph. I needed 125 pages to get from Labor Day to Christmas vacation. In six more words, here’s spring.

If you're going to immerse yourself in a project for three years, why not stake out a chunk of the world that is completely alien to you and go traveling?

I keep a quotes journal - of every sentence that I've wanted to remember from my reading of the past 30 years.

Reading is the last act of secular prayer.

I like to travel and connect.