And what's the point of waking up in the morning if you don't try to match the enormousness of the known forces in the world with something powerful in your own life?

California deserves whatever it gets. Californians invented the concept of life-style. This alone warrants their doom.

Maybe when we die, the first thing we'll say is 'I know this feeling. I was here before'.

Making things difficult for the reader is less an attack on the reader than it is on the age and its facile knowledge-market.

We seem to believe it is possible to ward off death by following rules of good grooming.

Every advance in knowledge and technique is matched by a new kind of death, a new strain. Death adapts, like a viral agent.

I've come to think of Europe as a hardcover book, America as the paperback version.