But spending your life concentrating on death is like watching a whole movie and thinking only about the credits that are going to roll at the end. It’s a mistake of emphasis.
I blush easily. I have difficulty meeting people’s eye, difficulty with public speaking, the normal afflictions of the shy, but not to a paralysing degree.
Wikipedia is just an incredible thing. It is fact-encirclingly huge, and it is idiosyncratic, careful, messy, funny, shocking and full of simmering controversies – and it is free, and it is fast.
I wrote about World War II because I didn’t understand it. I think that’s the reason that historians are drawn to any subject – there’s something about it that doesn’t make sense. I wanted to work my way through what happened slowly, and look at everything in the order in which it took place.
You can register a political objection in a number of ways.
Wikipedia flourished partly because it was a shrine to altruism.
While I was writing I assumed it would be published under a pseudonym, and that liberated me: what I wrote was exactly what I wanted to read.
Each decision – to kill, to sign a petition, to write a letter, to make a speech, to attack, to lie, to surrender – was made at some point in somebody’s day.
When I really want to be soothed and reminded of why people bother to fiddle with sentences, I often read poetry.
Many good poets are really essayists who write very short essays.
I’ve never been a fast reader. I’m fickle; I don’t finish books I start; I put a book aside for five, ten years and then take it up again.
I like shelves full of books in a library, but if all books become electronic, the task of big research libraries remains the same – keep what’s published in the form in which it appeared.
I wanted my first novel to be a veritable infarct of narrative cloggers-the trick being to feel your way through each clog by blowing it up until its obstructiveness finally reveals not blank mass but unlooked-for seepage points of passage.
I think I am done with Wikipedia for the time being. But I have a secret hope. Someone recently proposed a Wikimorgue – a bin of broken dreams where all rejects could still be read, as long as they weren’t libelous or otherwise illegal.
Updike was the first to take the penile sensorium under the wing of elaborate metaphorical prose.
Most good novelists have been women or homosexuals. The novel is the triumphant evolved creation, one increasingly has to think, of these two groups, who have cooperated more closely in this domain than in any other.
Most writers are secretly worried that they’re not really writers. That it’s all been happenstance, something came together randomly, the letters came together, and they won’t coalesce ever again.
The function of a great library is to store obscure books.
Sometimes, despite the fact that you’re reading through masses of material, you just can’t not think about a certain event, for it seems to capture the reality of the entire situation so much better than any set of statistics.
True, the name of the product wasn’t so great. Kindle? It was cute and sinister at the same time – worse than Edsel, or Probe, or Microsoft’s Bob. But one forgives a bad name. One even comes to be fond of a bad name, if the product itself is delightful.