He said, "The word for moonlight is moonlight.

The power of the dead is that we think they see us all the time. The dead have a presence. Is there a level of energy composed solely of the dead? They are also in the ground, of course, asleep and crumbling. Perhaps we are what they dream.

People think about who they are in the stillest hour of the night. I carry this thought, the child's mystery and terror of this thought, I feel this immensity in my soul every second of my life.

I think literature has lost it's power. Great novels continue to be written, but they are no longer changing the world.

Everything is barely weeks. Everything is days. We have minutes to live.

What good is knowledge if it just floats in the air? It goes from computer to computer. It changes and grows every second of every day. But nobody actually knows anything.

In my experience, writing a novel tends to create its own structure, its own demands, its own language, its own ending. So for much of the period in which I'm writing, I'm waiting to understand what's going to happen next, and how and where it's going to happen. In some cases, fairly early in the process, I do know how a book will end. But most of the time, not at all, and in this particular case, many questions are still unanswered, even though I've been working for months.