I've noticed that nowadays I'm doing a lot of stuff on the phone and on the computer, which I usually wouldn't do earlier. And I can feel my brain being rewired: I'm getting anxious, I'm getting more manic. Now, I'm an extreme case because I'm old and I'm overdoing it. But still, it's really interesting that I can actually feel a change in my neurochemistry from this interaction with the technology.

I don't know about transformation. But scientifically you can say: Well, it doesn't seem to hurt anybody. Personally I've been cheered by books at really critical moments. That much I believe.

As a young kid I assumed that everybody was sort of on the same wavelength as I was and then I found out in a lot of small ways that that wasn't the case. It's sort of a mixed blessing. My mind is like a puppy. It goes all over. I guess writing fiction was a way of harnessing that. I could hook a puppy up to a treadmill and get something out of it.

At times, they're so Right and I'm so Left, we agree.

It's funny with fiction - once you cut something, it hasn't happened anymore.

I'm not thinking much about overall themes or preoccupations or anything like that. Instead I'm just trusting that, if I'm working hard, various notions and riffs and motifs and so on are very naturally suffusing the stories and the resulting book.

I say yes to the hot bath and the sandwich - to getting ourselves into the best possible mental shape to identify and then fight the necessary fights from the best possible mind-state: calm, loving, affectionate, precise. Not pushovers but also not zealots. With the idea in mind that "our enemies" are not our enemies; they might seem like that in their present form but that form can morph. We really are large, and really do contain multitudes. But I think it all has to start with a kindly presence of mind, and the aspiration to affection for others.