“When you’re young, you look at television and think, There’s aconspiracy. The networks have conspired to dumb us down. Butwhen you get a little older, you realize that’s not true. The networksare in business to give people exactly what they want. That’s a farmore depressing thought. Conspiracy is optimistic! You can shootthe bastards! We can have a revolution! But the networks are reallyin business to give people what they want. It’s the truth.”

“That’s what you wanted me for,” he all but growled. His dick was going to cuss him for a bastard if he didn’t get inside her. But he’d just have to take it. This was about leaving her wanting more. “Wasn’t it? To get you dirty. That’s why you know you’re going to let me do it. After I leave and you cool down, you’ll tell yourself you won’t. But one day, you’ll beg me for it, because you know there’s more, and you know I can give it to you.”

“Looking can make you want. Wanting can get you thinking. If you want them to stop thinking, just give them what they want.”

“You can have everything in life that you want if you just give enough other people what they want.”

“There’s a temptation in our networked age to think that ideas can be developed by email and iChat. That’s crazy. Creativity comes from spontaneous meetings, from random discussions. You run into someone, you ask what they’re doing, you say ‘wow,’ and soon you’re cooking up all sorts of ideas.”

“You teach the reader that he’s way smarter than he thought he was. I think one of the insidious lessons about TV is the meta-lesson that you’re dumb. This is all you can do. This is easy, and you’re the sort of person who really just wants to sit in a chair and have it easy. When in fact there are parts of us, in a way, that are a lot more ambitious than that. And what we need… is seriously engaged art that can teach again that we’re smart. And that’s the stuff that TV and movies — although they’re great at certain things — cannot give us. But that have to create the motivations for us to want to do the extra work, to get those other kinds of art… Which is tricky, because you want to seduce the reader, but you don’t want to pander or manipulate them. I mean, a good book teaches the reader how to read it.”