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.

I have a lot of theories about the beneficial effects of fiction, but I'm always trying to get away from them a little bit.

I have this tendency to take a little bit of questionable knowledge and riff on it.

I like [Barak] Obama. I like him. So how far does rationality help to persuade anybody? You know, I'm not so sure.

The way I understood purgatory - and maybe you've got a different version - but in Chicago in the '70s, the idea was it was like detention. You had screwed up and you go over there in purgatory and you sit there until the end of days and then we'll decide. You'd made your mistake, and you were in prison, and it's not terrible and it's not great, and you feel a little crappy because you were not in the presence of God.

You go to the marketplace and there are seventeen consciousnesses moving in and out. Sometimes you want the same shirt that I want, and our thought bubbles collide a bit and that makes plot.

Developing our sympathetic compassion is not only possible but the only reason for us to be here on earth.