I Don't Do All That Well In

When I Really Want To Be Soothed And Reminded Of Why People Bother To Fiddle With Sentences, I Often Read Poetry.

Maybe The Kindle Was The Bowflex Of Bookishness: Something Expensive That, When You Commit To It, Forces You To Do More Of Whatever It Is You Think You Should Be Doing More Of.

There's Something Paralyzing About Being A Writer That You Have To Escape. I Don't Want To Think Of Myself As A Guy Who's Written A Bunch Of Books. The 26 Letters Distance Us From Our Own Hesitations And They Make Us Sound As If We Know What We're Doing. We Know Grammar, We Know Prose, But Actually We're All Just Struggling In The Dark, Really.

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.

The Function Of A Great Library Is To Store Obscure Books.