Because sometimes you have no control over life and it keeps you far away from who you love.

Writing is a mode of agency in the world that is different from mere employment. There has to be some sort of ethical or moral drive, even if you are unaware of it.

If you find yourself as a person in unfamiliar territory, you will grasp on to what is already familiar.

I don't know the numbers, but roughly half of the people who came through Ellis Island returned home. They came here to make money, not to make history.

All the lives I could live, all the people I will never know, never will be, they are everywhere. That is all that the world is.

The beauty of literature - also its limit - is that it is inescapably personal, even if you're writing science fiction.

The mind is complicated and you can't trace the roots of its processes, but there is something about mathematical and algorithmic patterns that I like to recognize in things.