How could anyone survive even a single day, if he didn't feel as if he was, in some little great way, needed?

The burden of intelligence: you can always imagine all those wonderful places where you can never belong.

How could anyone survive even a single day, if he didn't feel as if he was, in some little great way, needed?

Occasionally, I'll dream I'm in the factory. That will help me write. Not creatively, but more like a prod. I don't want to go back there.

A community that learns together excels together. We need to form communities that learn together.

I can't point to a moment or incident that made me see that this business, this putting down words on paper, was what I would do for the rest of my lucid life. But apparently, that is my calling.

2001: A Space Odyssey was a wonderful conundrum when I was a boy, with its giant concepts thrown across the giant screen at Indian Hills Theater. That movie woke me up in ways that I hadn't imagined, and I went searching for book versions of the same drug.