“I’ve always thought of encountering readers—of having any readers at all—as an unbelievable gift. Giving lectures, signing books, sitting hopefully behind a table at a bookstore in Wichita Falls: these rituals may be humbling, but I’ve never forgotten the fact that thousands of unpublished writers in this country would give anything to be humiliated in exactly this way. Of all the mortifications to be found in an author’s life, probably none hurts so much as the kind you get from not being able to share your work with another soul.” – Jennifer Finney Boylan in a NYT Op-Ed on Salinger, seclusion, PR in the digital age

“A real friendship ought to introduce each person to unexpected weirdness in the other. Each acquaintance is an alien, a well of unexplored difference in the experience of life that cannot be imagined or accessed in any way but through genuine interaction.” – Jaron Lanier in YOU ARE NOT A GADGET