I had a lot of really terrible advice early in my writing career, and I cheesed off people without even knowing it, all the while thinking I was implementing good advice. Well, what can you do about it? Next.

I don't know if it's a very smart idea to admire the living.

I'm starting to wonder if pop culture is in its dying days, because everyone is able to customize their own lives with the images they want to see and the words they want to read and the music they listen to. You don't have the broader trends like you used to.

To have a healthy culture, you have to have stable health care financing and stable arts financing and stable sports financing, and if you don't have that, your culture becomes a parking lot.

I go to the gym three days a week. You have to or else - I don't want to be the guy that dies shoveling snow.

My question about luging is, How do you get into the luge community to begin with? Is it one day like, 'Mom, Dad, I really want to luge.' And your parents are like: 'O.K., I'll quit my job. We'll move to an Alpine community.'

When you think about Twitter and you think what a dumb stupid throwaway technology, and then you have the Iranian elections and it actually saves the day - you can't prejudge technologies now because they have effects you may not have intended.

I get verklempt if I see a vintage TI-30 or TI-54 calculator. But I don't think I'd want to use one.

I'm a pretty good drawer. I have trouble painting because you literally have to wait for the paint to dry. I'm disciplined, but I'm not patient.

I worship teachers. They can't be paid enough. It depresses me that society sees them as somehow expendable.

Everyone wants to share what he or she has learned with someone who really cares.

Most time capsules, when they're unearthed, are really awful. There's nothing good in them.

Twinkies are more natural than most TV-interview shows.

For whatever reason, I tend to get reporters who are maybe in the middle of intense therapy, and they turn what's supposed to be a professional interview into therapy for themselves.

Characters in a book are very much like personalities divvied up within a family. In the end, it all averages out to a sort of overall averageness.

Books arrive in my head all at once, and then it becomes an 18-month process of getting it all down on paper.

I think Americans are weirdly puritanistic about psychopharmaceuticals. There are millions of people out there who would otherwise be dead or rocking by themselves in a corner who now lead full and normal lives because of amazing and wonderful scientific advances.

I grew up with three brothers, so nearly everything I had was destroyed or made fun of.

I love working out how things are made, which is why I have so many models of towers.

I keep vampire hours, going to bed at 2 A.M. and waking up at about 10:30-11 A.M.

I connect fashion to other peoples' elegance, but not my own. I don't think I've ever felt elegant. I've felt appropriate, but never elegant, and I wonder what that must be like. I like it when other people are elegant - I prefer it - but I can't do it myself. I honestly think it's some form of autistic disorder.

If you waste five minutes of time a day, over the course of a year that adds up to one full work day. Think of five wasted minutes as a slow-release holiday drug. Savour it.

Most men pursue pleasure with such breathless haste that they hurry past it.

I now know that anything sweet, really sweet, that I have was nothing that I planned. If you don't have kids and animals, you don't truly know what real life is about.