You have to break through the structure of your own stonework habit just to make yourself listen.

The greater the scientific advance, the more primitive the fear.

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.

There is a set of balances and rhythms to a novel that we can't experience in real life. So I think there is a sense in which fiction can rescue history from confusion.

It is so much simpler to bury reality than it is to dispose of dreams

We live in an age of rapid mass media, television, Internet. They determine our tempo, not books.

When I work, I'm just translating the world around me in what seems to be straightforward terms. For my readers, this is sometimes a vision that's not familiar. But I'm not trying to manipulate reality. This is just what I see and hear.