Music forecasts the past, recalls the future. Now and then the difference falls away, and in one simple gift of circling sound, the ear solves the scrambled cryptogram. One abiding rhythm, present and always, and you're free. But a few measures more, and the cloak of time closes back around you.

The job of taste was to thin the insane torrent of human creativity down to manageable levels. But the job of appetite was never to be happy with taste.

The loneliness of writing is that you baffle your friends and change the lives of strangers.

Evil is the refusal to see one's self in others.

This idea that a book can either be about character and feeling, or about politics and idea, is just a false binary. Ideas are an expression of the feelings and the intense emotions we hold about the world.

My goal for technology has always been to reach a point where the technological mediation becomes invisible.

My dream has always been to suspend myself in space when I write, and lying horizontal in bed is the closest to doing that.