“Let's see if I can write about something other than my heart.”

“There's no present left. This is the problem for a novelist. [The problem] is the present is gone. We're all living in the future constantly . . . Back in the day Leo Tolstoy -- what a sweetheart o...”

“There's nothing wrong with her except she's completely fucked up.”

“The novel was set in an unspecified near future, because setting a novel in the present in a time of unprecedented technological and social dislocation seemed to me shortsighted.... To write a book...”

“My hair would continue to gray, and then one day, it would fall out entirely, and then, on a day meaninglessly close to the present one, meaninglessly like the present one, I would disappear from t...”

“I write because there is nothing as joyful as writing, even when the writing is twisted and full of hate, the self-hate that makes writing not only possible but necessary. I hate myself, I hate the...”

“Is there magic in this world? Certainly! But it is not the kind of magic written about in fantasy stories. It is the kind of magic that comes from ideas and the hard work it often takes to make the...”

“We become what we behold. We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us.”

“A culture of unaccountability is a culture without incentive, and a culture without incentive is the death of critical and creative thinking.”

“It is better to be hated for what you are than to be loved for what you are not.”

“If I am going to be drownedif I am going to be drownedif I am going to be drowned, why, in the name of the seven mad gods who rule the sea, was I allowed to come thus far and contemplate sand and t...”

“I'm an Earth ecstatic, and my creed is simple: All life is sacred, life loves life, and we are capable of improving our behavior toward one another. As basic as that is, for me it's also tonic and ...”

“They had killed themselves over our dying forests, over manatees maimed by propellers as they surfaced to drink from garden hoses; they had killed themselves at the sight of used tires stacked high...”

“The world seemed to shimmer a little at the edges.”

“If we cannot accept the importance of the world, which considers itself important, if in the midst of that world our laughter finds no echo, we have but one choice: to take the world as a whole and...”