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Q: Is writing your novels pleasure or drudgery?

A: Pleasure and agony while composing the book in my mind; harrowing irritation when struggling with my tools and viscera — the pencil that needs resharpening, the card that has to be rewritten, the bladder that has to be drained, the word that I always misspell and always have to look up. Then the labor of reading the typescript prepared by a secretary, the correction of my major mistakes and her minor ones, transferring corrections to other copies, misplacing pages, trying to remember something that had to be crossed out or inserted. Repeating the process when proofreading. Unpacking the radiant, beautiful, plump advance copy, opening it — and discovering a stupid oversight committed by me, allowed by me to survive. After a month or so, I get used to the book’s final stage, to its having been weaned from my brain. I now regard it with a kind of amused tenderness as a man regards not his son, but the young wife of his son.

A rare and wonderful 1969 audio Q&A with Nabokov – part interview, part performance art.

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Neuroscientist David Eagleman, author of the excellent Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain, explains the curious neurological wire-crossing of synesthesia. Complement with a synesthetic person’s first-hand account of the experience.

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The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.

Happy birthday, Aldous Huxley – his prophetic 1958 interview by Mike Wallace

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“…to take part in nature’s reforming of her own environment…”

A rare 1979 interview with Buckminster Fuller.

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Maybe we can get rid of a lot of lousy TV, I hope. It can look better if we can destroy most bad TV shows and most bad movies, really making more quality movies. And maybe we’ll redo our educational system and begin to teach reading and writing again. We’re not doing it now, and until we do, we’re going to be a stupid race.

Ray Bradbury on education, media, and our obligation to future generations in a rare 2003 interview.

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Jonathan Harris on social media as “routing devices for human attention… providing our species with a common nervous system.”

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It’s not an intellectual thing when a mother protects her child; it’s an instinctive behaviour. We value all those things in the human being because we are human beings! But that’s pretty short sighted and narrow minded and I think it’s down to what Jeremy Bentham said which is, “…the question is not can they reason? Or can they talk? …But can they suffer?”

PETA co-founder and president Ingrid Newkirk on humanity’s relationship with animals

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What Facebook did for personal lives, we want to do for learning lives.

Lore founder and Explore publisher Joseph Cohen reflects on the rebranding of Coursekit and the broader mission.

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Writers do not merely reflect and interpret life, they inform and shape life.

E. B. White on the role and responsibility of the writer in a fantastic Paris Review interview circa 1969.

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Being bored is a kind of diagnostic for the gap between what you might be interested in and your current environment.

Clay Shirky, brilliant as ever, on the future of reading.

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There’s never been a shortage of whistles; there’s always been a shortage of people willing to blow them.

New York Times media sage David Carr on curation, censorship, paywalls, and the future of journalism.

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I think that people seem less and less concerned about where their information comes from at a time when I think they should be more and more concerned about it.

The New York Times’ David Carr on curation, crowdsourcing, and the future of journalism – a must-read.

For a related read, see Clay Johnson’s excellent The Information Diet.

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“I’m not essentially a happy person, but I have all kinds of joy. And there is a difference, you know.”

Several days after his 70th birthday in 1985, Orson Welles, sharp as ever, made his final TV appearance on The Merv Griffin Show. Welles passed away two hours after the interview was taped.

(ᔥ Open Culture)

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After predicting the digital convergence in 1964 and the iPad in 1968, Arthur C. Clarke predicts the Internet, networked society, and personal computers in 1974.

(ᔥ Open Culture)

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“It’s an important line in the book, from a Rumi poem, that each of us must enter the nest made by the other imperfect bird – which I really think means that, when all is said and done, all we have to offer one another is a welcome in each other’s messy nest, and maybe a cup of tea while we’re at it.”

Fantastic Studio 360 interview with the inimitable Anne Lamott, whose Bird by Bird has changed many a creative life.