Sometimes, though, I feel that pushing books is a whole lot like pushing medicine. Think of books as pills. I have pills that cure ignorance and pills that cure boredom. I have pills to elevate moods and pills to open people's eyes to the awful truth: uppers and downers as they were. I sell pills to help people find themselves and pills to help them lose themselves when they require escape from the pressures and anxieties of life in a complex society.

Whatever goes wrong can be used to your advantage, providing it goes wrong enough.

We only rise above mediocrity when there's something at stake. p. 174

Conservatives understand Halloween, liberals only understand Christmas. If you want to control a population, don't give it social services, give it a scary adversary.

Perhaps the most terrible (or wonderful) thing that can happen to an imaginative youth, aside from the curse (or blessing) of imagination itself, is to be exposed without preparation to the life outside his or her own sphere - the sudden revelation that there is a there out there.

To some extent, Seattle remains a frontier metropolis, a place where people can experiment with their lives, and change and grow and make things happen.

My life is not merely a public phenomenon, it is a solitary adventure as well.