I ordered a Kindle 2 from Amazon. How could I not? There were banner ads for it all over the Web. Whenever I went to the Amazon Web site, I was urged to buy one.

I woke up thinking a very pleasant thought. There is lots left in the world to read.

Books: a beautifully browsable invention that needs no electricity and exists in a readable form no matter what happens.

For me, as a beginning novelist, all other living writers form a control group for whom the world is a placebo.

Printed books usually outlive bookstores and the publishers who brought them out. They sit around, demanding nothing, for decades. That's one of their nicest qualities - their brute persistence.

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.

Haven't you felt a peculiar sort of worry about the chair in your living room that no one sits in?

Poetry is prose in slow motion.

Spoon the sauce over the ice cream. It will harden. This is what you have been working for.

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.

Shoes are the first adult machines we are given to master.

I'm a laugher and a lover of comedy.

You persist in this romantic vision of what it is to be a vampire, but despite my best efforts to curb it I have a taste for blood.

One person's enemy is another person's best friend. My favorite food might give you a rash.

People procrastinate because they are afraid of the success that they know will result if they move ahead now.

Those are shrines. Some people believe spirits live in them.

Structures can be manipulated for ill as well, especially when people are dealing with issues of power, or control, or violence.

Know which officials are voted into office and which are appointed, and by whom.

Gods play games with the fates of men. But first they have to get all the pieces on the board and look all over the place for the dice.

Drown thyself? Drown cats and blind puppies.