“Now, when I look back on the few years that I spent in close proximity to Butler, I find that I cannot do so without experiencing a kind of concomitant regret. I ask myself how I might have succeeded in being a better neighbor or friend to a person whose celebrity status seemed, to me, to mean that she needed neither.”
“For years, Judy Malloy would not get the credit she deserved for being one of the earliest pioneers of ‘electronic literature,’ as the literary hypertext movement came to be called: pieces by men writing later became more famous and better-studied.”
“It might be embarrassing today to admit that I learned my first bits of English from the three volumes of the adventures of Larry, a game series that even back then wasn’t particularly respectable. But this was the only such game I knew, school in 1989 was still exclusively into Russian.”
“I’ve written a memoir that dealt with my worst periods of destitution, but I’ve never told any interviewer my real feelings around getting a book published: the abject terror that the book won’t sell and I’ll end up poor again, homeless again, in the street in the rain with whatever I can carry, with a cold, looking at the windows of restaurants and homes, at all the warm life I can’t afford.”