Solitude is a breeding ground for idiosyncrasy, and I relish that about it, the way it liberates whim.

The kinds of roles dogs fill can be hard to come by in human relationships. We touch the dog or the pet at whim. There is a lack of self-consciousness and a fluidity to it that is absent from most human relationships. If someone acted that way to you, you'd feel claustrophobic pretty quickly. It's a boundary violation.

Fall in love with a dog, and in many ways you enter a new orbit, a universe that features not just new colors but new rituals, new rules, a new way of experiencing attachment.

Before you get a dog, you can't quite imagine what living with one might be like; afterward, you can't imagine living any other way.

On the broad spectrum of solitude, I lean toward the extreme end: I work alone, as well as live alone, so I can pass an entire day without uttering so much as a hello to another human being. Sometimes a day's conversation consists of only five words, uttered at the local Starbucks: 'Large coffee with milk, please.'

fertile breeding ground for extremists.