Thanks to the circus between my ears, I can seize upon the smallest disquieting observation and from it extrapolate a terror of cataclysmic proportions.

less real than such threats as a man with a gun, a woman with a knife, or a U.S. Senator with an idea.

There's still a fascination with somebody who can write at book length, no matter what the book is.

I fall down on the side of free will, simply because if you look at where I came from, and what I was able to do in my life, what was able to happen.

I have more self-doubt than any writer I've ever known.... The positive aspect of self-doubt - if you can channel it into useful activity instead of being paralyzed by it - is that by the time you reach the end of a novel, you know precisely why you made every decision in the narrative, the multiple purposes of every metaphor and image.

There is nothing fatherly about time and what it does to us, either.

Every world has dogs or their equivalent, creatures that thrive on companionship, creatures that are of a high order of intelligence although not the highest and that therefore is simple enough in their wants and needs to remain innocent. The combination of their innocence and their intelligence allows them to serve as a bridge bewtween what is transient and what is eternal, between the finate and the infinate.