The nice thing about a protest song is that it takes the complaint, the fussing, the finger-pointing, and gives it an added component of sociable har….

Printed books usually outlive bookstores and the publishers who brought them out. They sit around, demanding nothing, for decades. That's one of thei….

Many good poets are really essayists who write very short essays..

Poetry is prose in slow motion..

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. T….

Wikipedia is just an incredible thing. It is fact-encirclingly huge, and it is idiosyncratic, careful, messy, funny, shocking and full of simmering c….

The job of the novel is to be true to the confusion, but not so confusing that you turn the reader off..

Footnotes are the finer-suckered surfaces that allow testicular paragraphs to hold fast to the wider reality of the library..

Some after-the-fact storytelling is inevitable, and, in fact, very good and useful. But then we want always to be able to enrich the stories, or mayb….

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. I….

History isn't a seesaw. If you have a really bad regime on one side, the actions on the other side don't automatically become good. It doesn't work t….

Most writers are secretly worried that they're not really writers. That it's all been happenstance, something came together randomly, the letters cam….

The function of a great library is to store obscure books..

A problem that I have with everything fictional is that writers are always having to come up with sudden artillery explosions in the middle of whatev….

Friends, both the imaginary ones you build for yourself out of phrases taken from a living writer, or real ones from college, and relatives, despite ….

Of course, individuals are responsible for individual actions - the pilots who flew over Pearl Harbor and dropped bombs on those ships did a terrible….

I would like to visit the factory that makes train horns, and ask them how they are able to arrive at that chord of eternal mournfulness. Is it delib….

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

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

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

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