Recent quotes:

They chart my life. I don't want to sound ponderous, but they chart my intellectual life. They chart everything that I've been interested in and thought about for the whole of my reading life. So if they went I would, in a sense, lose a sense of identity. They identify me. ... Most of them I shall never read again, but you never know what you may want to go back to. And it does constantly happen to me that there's something that I suddenly think, "Oh, I've got that book, let me just look that up." I do it every day.
I don’t think I have an unmet need to interact with random unknown people. After all, Josh Miller is not screening out the uncool, so after the surge of the glitterati it will be simply random people, even if they are the next door neighbor of somehow I vaguely know. My real need is to gather information that is critical to my ongoing research practice, ie living on earth in the present day. And as a side effect of that, I have been meeting really cool people already, in the normal course of events. They are my Twitter contacts, or the folks I follow on Tumblr. Potluck has it backward.