I think fiction comes from everything you've ever done, and said, and dreamed, and imagined. It comes from everything you've read and haven't read... I think my work comes out of the culture of the world around me. I think that's where my language comes from.

Sometimes a thing that's hard is hard because you're doing it wrong. (Point Omega)

The future is always a wholeness, a sameness. We're all tall and happy there,' she said. 'This is why the future fails. It always fails. It can never be the cruel happy place we want to make it.

He took pains to avoid self-depreciation, self-mockery, ambiguity, irony, subtlety, vulnerability, a civilized world-weariness and a tragic sense of history--the very things, he says, that are most natural to him.

Something lurked inside the truth.

I slept for four years. I didn't study much of anything. I majored in something called communication arts.

Being called a 'bad citizen' is a compliment to a novelist, at least to my mind. That's exactly what we ought to do.