My whole life is about forgetting. It's my most valuable job skill.

Imagine a plague you catch through your ears.

The gyms you go to are crowded with guys trying to look like men, as if being a man means looking the way a sculptor or an art director says.

We're consumers. We are by-products of a lifestyle obsession. Murder, crime, poverty, these things don't concern me. What concerns me are celebrity magazines, television with 500 channels, some guy's name on my underwear. Rogaine, Viagra, Olestra...

Abortion occurs so frequently in my stories. Abortion sort of synthesizes both sex and death. To have sex and death placed as close to one another as possible is always a goal of mine.

My books do have a sort of romantic community at the end - people coming together. But on a more basic level, I always see them as being about power, in the same way that Harry Potter books are pitched to a population of young people who really have no power.

To repeat, the way you get to the huge, impossible yes is, you start collecting a lot of easy, small yeses.