A novel determines its own size and shape and I've never tried to stretch an idea beyond the frame and structure it seemed to require.

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

It is interesting ... how weapons reflect the soul of the maker.

Stories have no point if they don't absorb our terror.

Not long ago, a novelist could believe he could have an effect on our consciousness of terror. Today, the men who shape and inflence human consciousness are the terrorists.

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.

days like this. i look at you and feel electric. tell me you don't feel it too."_Eric Packer