“Writing is the process of finding something to distract you from writing, and of all the helpful distractions – adultery, alcohol and acedia, all of which aided our writing fathers – none can equal the Internet.”

Protein was the most valued ingredient 250 years ago: It was the rarest thing. Now the rarest thing we have is time: time to cook and time to eat.

There are two kinds of travelers. There is the kind who goes to see what there is to see, and the kind who has an image in his head and goes out to accomplish it.

You learn to sing with, not argue at, your possible readers.

I don’t think there’s any question journalists have become targets, but then I think that – that anyone who tries to practice liberty becomes a target of fanatics.

Music is a current of hard choices made to seem easy by the mind.

Leafing through Forbes or Fortune [magazine]s is like reading the operating manual of a strangely sanctimonious pirate ship

Lose your schematic conventions by finding some surprising symbol or shape in the welter of shades, and draw that.

If we had been there listening, we still might not have been able to determine exactly what Stanton said. All we know for sure is that everyone was weeping, and the room was full.

Would mistrust a poetry critic who couldn’t produce a rhyming couplet. Could one write about art without knowing how to draw?

Someone once said that the joy is not in writing but in having written. I can’t say I find that to be true, though I understand the sentiment.

Frauds master our minds; magicians, like poets and lovers, engage them in a permanent maze of possibilities.

The past is so often unknowable not because it is befogged now but because it was befogged then, too, back when it was still the present.

I try to turn a written thing, when I’m in trouble with it, into a spoken thing: I start imagining what I would say to someone if I were trying to tell the story or make the argument.

What drives innovation is abundance and ease, not the pressure of scarcity.

The future will be like the past, in the sense that, no matter how amazing or technologically advanced a society becomes

I think if journalists start doing that then they won’t be practicing journalism. If satirists start doing that then they won’t be practicing satire.

I try to block out everything that distracts me. Even a big play, I blank it out.

You cannot control your own population by force, but it can be distracted by consumption.

Thanks to the internet, I buy lots of music, but thanks to my easily distracted nature, I forget about half of it!

I build a kind of wall between myself and t he model so that I can paint in peace behind it. Otherwise, she might say something that confuses and distracts me.

Being specific about what you want and how you will achieve it helps you say no to things that derail progress, distract your attention, and pull you off course.

I spent many years of my life as an economist and demographer. I was finally distracted by writing my novels and poetry. I’m enormously happy that was the case. I feel that with writing I have found my metier.

We live in a world where too many minds are distracted while their souls are asleep.

Be with someone who loves you with eyes closed. No surface distractions.