Over the past eight years, one thing that’s different is that I take longer breaks. I’ll sometimes go months without writing, which is not something I used to do. I used to write every day. I still take a lot of notes, but I think I allow myself more time to be receptive to the world, as opposed to always worrying about saying something. I think it’s very much a poet’s novel, which means it’s basically—a woman stands out in a field thinking about other times she stood out in a field. And I think a lot of my energy when living in the city was going towards the performance of being human. That idea of “Hello! Look, I got dressed today. Ta-da!”

Writer Ted Gioia on how important high-quality inputs are to mainting high-quality output.

The intellectual is, quite simply, a human being who has a pencil in his or her hand when reading a book. —George Steiner Photographer Bill Hayes wrote a nice essay about Oliver Sacks’ love of words, and he’s been posting images of Sacks’ hand-annotated