Once upon a time ... the only autonomous intelligences we humans knew of were us humans. We thought then that if humankind ever devised another intelligence that it would be the result of a huge project ... a great mass of silicon and ancient transistors and chips and circuit boards ... a machine with lots of networking circuits, in other words, aping-if you will pardon the expression-the human brain in form and function. Of course, AIs did not evolve that way. They sort of slipped into existence when we humans were looking the other way.

It started 25 years ago, when I was teaching elementary school in a small town in Missouri

Prison always has been a good place for writers, killing, as it does, the twin demons of mobility and diversion

Pain is an interesting and off-putting thing. Few if any things in life concentrate our attention so completely and terribly, and few things are more boring to listen to or read about.

Religion seems to have always offered us that false duality ... the silences of infinite space or the cozy comfort of inner certainty.

War must never be a condition but, rather, a temporary scourge which we suffer as a child does a fever, knowing that health follows the long night of pain and that peace is health.

If everyone could understand the working of a psychopath's mind, we undoubtedly would be closer to insanity ourselves.