The best thing about writing programs is that it rationalized the apprenticeship of a writer.

And there are people who want to be writers because they love to write. And they care.

Chimpanzees are endangered. Severely.

We know that people we love are both good and bad, but we expect strangers to be one or the other.

And out of a desire essentially to imitate what I was reading, I began to write, like a clever monkey.

One of the things I have tried to do with this book and with all of them really is avoid that simple, easy, reductionist view of motivation and to show we do things for a complex net of reasons, a real braid of reasons.

But really, it was reading that led me to writing. And in particular, reading the American classics like Twain who taught me at an early age that ordinary lives of ordinary people can be made into high art.