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1. Shoes are the first adult machines we are given to master.
2. I really practiced hard and got to a certain level of technical proficiency. I overcame some of my limitations. I was a hard-working, dedicated bassoonist, but I have to say I’m not a natural musician.
3. I don’t do all that well in the writerly world. I’m happier being outside the flow.
4. So I really began as a failed poet — although when I first wanted to be a writer, I learned to write prose by reading poetry.
5. I keep thinking I’ll enjoy suspense novels, and sometimes I do. I’ve read about 20 Dick Francis novels.
6. From my music training, I knew that, some Spanish rhythms apart, 5/4 is a time signature used only in the modern era. Holst’s Mars from the Planets is 5/4. But if you speak lines of poetry in that pattern you just end up hitting the off-beats. It’s only when you add a rest — a sixth beat — that it sounds as it surely should sound.
7. Wikipedia flourished partly because it was a shrine to altruism.
8. I’ve always thought of myself as shy.
9. 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.
10. There’s a time and place for the Kindle, and I own one now and have books on it that I don’t otherwise have. But I don’t find that my hand reaches out for it the way it does for a trade paperback, or (in the middle of the night) for the iPod Touch.
11. For me, as a beginning novelist, all other living writers form a control group for whom the world is a placebo.
12. 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 harmony.
13. I was very shy and somewhat awkward. I studied too hard. And to have this exciting dorm life was a whole new thing.
14. You can register a political objection in a number of ways.
15. 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.
16. Spoon the sauce over the ice cream. It will harden. This is what you have been working for.
17. I no longer want to live in an apartment furnished with forklifts and backhoes.
18. Haven’t you felt a peculiar sort of worry about the chair in your living room that no one sits in?
19. 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.
20. I hadn’t played any music since freshman year of college, more than thirty years ago, so I had to relearn everything. I started writing songs. Some were dance and trance songs (I listen to them a lot while I’m writing), and some were love songs, because that after all is what music is about — dancing and trancing and love and love’s setbacks.