To read fiction means to play a game by which we give sense to the immensity of things that happened, are happening, or will happen in the actual world. By reading narrative, we escape the anxiety that attacks us when we try to say something true about the world. This is the consoling function of narrative — the reason people tell stories, and have told stories from the beginning of time.

Even today, I frequently meet scientists who, outside their own narrow discipline, are superstitious.

From lies to forgeries the step is not so long, and I have written technical essays on the logic of forgeries and on the influence of forgeries on history.

It comes down to a question of attention: it's difficult to use the Net distractedly, unlike the television or the radio.

Libraries have always been humanities' way of preserving its collective wisdom

Only an unhinged movie survives as a disconnected series of images, of peaks, of visual icebergs. It should display not one central idea but many. It should not reveal a coherent philosophy of composition. It must live on, and because of, its glorious ricketiness.

Writing doesn't mean necessarily putting words on a sheet of paper. You can write a chapter while walking or eating.