We’re all tourists, sort of. Life is tourism, sort of. As far as I’m concerned, the dinosaurs still hold the lease on this godforsaken rock.

I think people feel very comfortable reviewing the idea of me, as opposed to what I've actually written. Most of the time, when people write about one of my books, they're really just writing about what they think I may or may not represent, as sort of this abstract entity. Is that unfair? Not really. If I put myself in this position where I'm going to kind of weave elements of memoir into almost everything, well, I suppose that's going to happen.

We are often wrong about the past, but at least with the past you can change your thinking. We can't do that with the future.

Observing someone without context amplifies the experience. The more we know, the less we are able to feel.

I think a bigger difference with social media is going to be things like the impact Instagram will have for historians. For the longest time, we had no images of the past. And then when we had the advent of the camera, we had a record of the things people chose to photograph, which, for a while, were portraits of your family, a new building we built, or a really big horse. Well now we have images of everything. That will be the biggest difference I think - that we will have a visual record of this reality in a way that will be completely covered.

If someone feels negative about the way society or culture seems to be going, what it probably suggests is that it's just moving away from the state that they are comfortable with or used to. It's understandable why someone would feel that way.

The Sims is an escapist vehicle for people who want to escape to where they already are, which is why I thought this game was made precisely for me.