The contours of the coming disaster expanded to include the deaths of all present.

I would kind of, you know, go stand next to some unlucky guy and say eventually, Hi, I'm George. You know, I'm with The New Yorker. I'm a liberal. I'm somewhat left of Gandhi. Do you want to talk? And, you know, they always did.

Why were we put here, so inclined to love, when end of our story = death? That harsh. That cruel. Do not like.

Honestly, the choice is: I can be a cheerful person, more awake to correction, more of a force for good ... when I'm writing. Or I can be the opposite of all those things, when I'm not writing.

I think about how I conceptualize the audience. The trick is that they've got to be smarter and more worldly than me. So as I'm revising, I'm keeping that in mind. I cannot condescend, even a little bit. Every single choice that I make is motivated by that.

It's a big world, and I really like it.

You can see a whole book as a series of creating an expectation and then delivering a skew on that expectation so it's not totally satisfied.