It is so easy to waste our lives: Our days, our hours, our minutes ... it is so easy to exist instead of live.

In books I have traveled, not only to other worlds, but into my own.

I never think about issues when I'm working on a novel. Issues are things that happen to people in sufficient numbers to elicit widespread attention; in other words, they're just life happening. That's what I think about: life, and telling a story.

While liberals had embraced Obama as someone who had left-wing progressive ideas, the truth is that by personality he's a very incremental guy.

Your hair isn't quite right and maybe you're a size bigger than you should be and on and on and on. I think there comes a moment when you've matured to the point where you suddenly think, nonsense. I am fine just the way I am.

Here is the real domino theory - gay man to gay man, bisexual man to straight woman, addict mother to newborn baby, they all fall down and someday it will come to you.

Our love of lockstep is our greatest curse, the source of all that bedevils us. It is the source of homophobia, xenophobia, racism, sexism, terrorism, bigotry of every variety and hue, because it tells us there is one right way to do things, to look, to behave, to feel, when the only right way is to feel your heart hammering inside you and to listen to what its timpani is saying.