We don't legislate emergent technologies into existence. We almost never do. They just emerge, dragged forth by Adam Smith's invisible hand. Then we have to see what people are actually going to do with them, and try to legislate to take account of that.

I find it interesting to see people - mostly people who are younger than I am - going to considerable trouble to try to reproduce things from an era that was far more physical, from a less virtual day.

Every shop in every High Street in Europe is filled with basically the same stuff. There's a street in every city of the world that has a Gap and Benneton's, and the upscale versions of those.

The experience of celebrity is gradually being democratized.

I took Punk to be the detonation of some slow-fused projectile buried deep in society's flank a decade earlier, and I took it to be, somehow, a sign.

I'm very primitive in terms of economics. The kind of new business in which stock gets more valuable because the company grows, but there must be limits to growth. But if publishing is expanding to fill that retail space, it seems like there may be a necessary and unpleasant correction waiting down the road. How many books to people WANT?

There's violence in my culture [from America's South].