For most people, there are only two places in the world. Where they live and their TV set. If a thing happens on television, we have every right to find it fascinating, whatever it is.

A Catholic is raised with the idea that he will die any minute now and if he doesn't live his life in a certain way, this death is an introduction to an eternity of pain.

The world is shrinking into a kind of technological funnel. I think people are drawn into their technological devices, and this becomes a kind of subjective universe, into which much of the rest of the world simply does not enter.

The world isn't going to be destroyed, but you don't feel safe anymore in your plane or train or office or auditorium.

When my head is in the typewriter the last thing on my mind is some imaginary reader. I don't have an audience; I have a set of standards.

There were moments when she wasn't talking so much as fading into time, dropping back into some funnelled stretch of recent past.

It frequently happens that I begin a novel with just a visual image of something, a vague sense of people in three dimensional space.