When I am emperor, I will abolish private education. Private schools, private college. All of these parents with money and energy and the drive for bake sales and a desire to leave their vast fortunes to education - everybody would have to be eating out of the same educational pot.

I think, if you want to grow a novelist, for that person to have a lot of boring time trying to entertain themselves is very important.

The love between humans is the thing that nails us to the earth.

My novels are very much the same, as I think many people's novels are. No matter how hard I try to do otherwise, the books always wind up being "a group of strangers are thrown together by circumstance and form a society."

It's always better to have too much to read than not enough.

Maybe there would be a bad outcome for some of the others, but no one was going to shoot a soprano.

I believe, in my better moments, that there is a plan and things go not the way we want them to but the way they should.