330 Quotes by Susan Orlean

The iPhone calendar isn’t bad, but it isn’t great, either. It only offers a day view and a month view – it doesn’t have a week view, which drives me crazy.

To my great surprise, Twitter is not housed in a silver pod that orbits Earth at supersonic speeds, vacuuming up and then dispersing digital bits of worldwide chitchat; it’s in a big, bland office building in downtown San Francisco, near a bowling alley and an Old Navy.

I remember, when I was a kid, watching my mother jam herself into her girdle – a piece of equipment so rigid it could stand up on its own – and I remember her coming home from fancy parties and racing upstairs to extricate herself from its cruel iron grip.

I think coexisting with another life form is a very rich experience. It’s why people keep plants and animals.

Destroying a library is a kind of terrorism. People think of libraries as the safest and most open places in society. Setting them on fire is like announcing that nothing, and nowhere, is safe.

I once had a boyfriend who couldn’t write unless he was wearing a necktie and a dress shirt, which I thought was really weird, because this was a long time ago, and no one I knew ever wore dress shirts, let alone neckties; it was like he was a grown-up reenacter or something.

I like the idea that people get engaged thinking about design, about creativity. I don’t see how it could possibly be bad.

I heard a computer scientist the other day refer to playing with the Kinect as ‘storytelling.’ At first I thought that sounded a little high-minded, but after trying a few games I could see what she meant.

Writers like to write, and writing in different forms – short, long, bite-sized, done on the fly, done with painstaking attention – all interest me.