It's difficult for me to understand how it was possible to live under the Bush regime for eight years and then just roll over and do other things.

Washington D.C.! Congress is full of self-declared outsiders.

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.

The privilege of a middle-class, stable, bourgeois life is that you can pretend that you are not complicated and project yourself as a solid, uncomplicated person, with refined life goals and achievements.

The hopeless hope is one of the early harbingers of spring, bespeaking an innocent belief that the world might right its wrongs and reverse its curses simply because the trees are coming into leaf.

Wherever there's capitalism there's this inclination toward simplicity. There's also a human need to process complicated things by turning them into something else.

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