I wanted us to share the sense that the number of wrong moves far exceeds the number of good moves, to share the frightening instability of the correct decision, to bond in being confounded.

I don't like having a teaching job - office hours and conferences and committees and bosses and all that - but I tend to enjoy teaching, and I design the course in such a way that there'll be pleasure in that.

Belief and delusion are incestuous siblings.

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.

We knew - but didn't want to know - what was going to happen, the sky descending upon our heads like the shadow of a falling piano in a cartoon.

There's no bad writing; you did something. I was operating inside language, and I did something. I'm not ashamed of it.

I cannot live or write without music. It stimulates the normally dormant parts of my brain that come in handy when constructing fiction.