Literary fiction, as a strict genre, is all but dead. Meanwhile, most genres flourish.

If someone wrote it and it had a peculiar twist, I've read it.

My life has a mysterious purpose that I don't understand, and day by day, conflict by conflict, I learn by going where I have to go.

I receive about 10,000 letters a year from readers, and in the first year after a book is published, perhaps 5,000 letters will deal specifically with that piece of work.

...in an infinite universe, anything that could be imagined might somewhere exist.

Even as a child, she had preferred night to day, had enjoyed sitting out in the yard after sunset, under the star-speckled sky listening to frogs and crickets. Darkness soothed. It softened the sharp edges of the world, toned down the too-harsh colors. With the coming of twilight, the sky seemed to recede; the universe expanded. The night was bigger than the day, and in its realm, life seemed to have more possibilities.

Fear is a hammer, and when the people are beaten finally to the conviction that their existence hangs by a frayed thread, they will be led where they need to go.