Food is the rare moral arena in which the ethical choice is generally the one more likely to make you groan with pleasure.

Prayer had always struck me as more or less a glorified attempt at a business transaction.

They all attended Hester's church, which Dellarobia viewed as a complicated pyramid scheme of moral debt and credit resting ultimately on the shoulders of the Lord, but rife with middle managers.

Nonfiction requires enormous discipline. You construct the terms of your story, and then you stick to them.

Your own family resemblances are a frustrating code, most easily read by those who know you least.

Feeling that morality has nothing to do with the way you use the resources of the world is an idea that can't persist much longer. If it does, then we won't.

If my setting is new to a reader, or the concerns of the novel are new, I hope they will learn something about the world. I would like to say that they can trust that what they do learn in the novel will be accurate, because I pay a lot of attention to facts. I do a lot of research to make sure that I'm not giving them, you know, blue moons of Jupiter. It's not science fiction.