It's a great game - the pursuit of happiness.
I blush easily. I have difficulty meeting people's eye, difficulty with public speaking, the normal afflictions of the shy, but not to a paralysing degree.
I woke up thinking a very pleasant thought. There is lots left in the world to read.
Books: a beautifully browsable invention that needs no electricity and exists in a readable form no matter what happens.
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 deliberately sad? Are the horns saying, Be careful, stay away from this train or it will run you over and then people will grieve, and their grief will be as the inconsolable wail of this horn through the night? The out-of-tuneness of the triad is part of its beauty.
As soon as you start doing that - changing things - it seems self-evident to me that you've entered the world of make-believe. If you pretend that it's true, and use your own name, you are misleading people. Fiction is looser and wilder and sometimes in the end more self-revealing, anyway.
Printed books usually outlive bookstores and the publishers who brought them out. They sit around, demanding nothing, for decades. That's one of their nicest qualities - their brute persistence.
One of the most common reasons people renovate their homes is a change in their lifestyle - an upcoming wedding, a new baby, or grown children moving away.
Then I did Mystic Pizza, just to do something I wasn't fat in.
I think doing the podcast may have been one of the best career decisions I've ever made in my life.
I like pizza and I like cheeseburgers a lot and I like Chicago food a lot.