If my mother hadn't tried to sell me chicken Kiev cutlets for $1.40 after I graduated from college, maybe I would've been the lawyer she wanted me to be.

Good fiction makes me turn off all the other parts of my brain, so that I become quiet and submissive, entirely at the mercy of the work at hand.

I reveled in the smallness, the coziness of an upstairs bedroom in a traditional American Cape Cod house the half-floor that forces you to duck, to feel small and naive again, ready for anything, dying for love, your body a chimney filled with odd, black smoke. These square, squat, awkward rooms are like a fifty-square-foot paean to teenage-hood, to ripeness, to the first and last taste of youth.

You want to read a book? That requires introspection. It requires time away from people and time away from the constant need to communicate and to connect.

Let's see if I can write about something other than my heart.

It is a capital insult in this country not to make love to a naked woman, even if she is related to you.

That's what I always liked about science fiction - you can make the world end. Humour is my multiple warhead delivery system.