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?

I've never actually been a collector. I like the learning-curve, but I buy things, sell them to finance other things.

And, for an instant, she stared directly into those soft blue eyes and knew, with an instinctive mammalian certainty, that the exceedingly rich were no longer even remotely human.

Some very considerable part of the gestural language of public places that had once belonged to cigarettes now belonged to phones.

Damien is a friend. Their boy-girl Lego doesn't click, he would say.

Tim Powers is a brilliant writer.

To some extent I'm guilty of wishful thinking. The absence of the interstitial I find unbearable.