My morning begins with trying not to get up before the sun rises. But when I do, it's because my head is too full of words, and I just need to get to my desk and start dumping them into a file. I always wake with sentences pouring into my head.

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

We're animals. We're born like every other mammal and we live our whole lives around disguised animal thoughts.

I know I'm a rare person, a trained scientist who writes fiction, because so few contemporary novelists engage with science.

No kind of bomb ever built will extinguish hatred.

A mother's body remembers her babies-the folds of soft flesh, the softly furred scalp against her nose. Each child has it's own entreaties to body and soul.

Oh, that river of wishes, the slippery crocodile dream of it, how it might have carried my body down through all the glittering sand bars to the sea.