Nostalgia is, 'Hey, remember the other mall that used to be there?'

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 feel that there is nothing that can happen to a person that is banal. Everything that happens to us is interesting.

I started out in engineering. I was a geophysical engineer. Throughout the course of my life I've done a lot of strange jobs, and the effect has been to make me think a little more skeptically about our capitalist society.

A country doesn't need a businessman to run it: it needs a heartful, worldly, compassionate leader.

Life is short, very short, and what are we doing here if not trying to become more generous and loving?

I haven't written a novel or something that long, because I really am improvising all along and the story is growing new limbs to do what it needs to do. So there's very little planning. There's a little planning where I say, "Well, it looks like I'm going in this direction, ok, good." But there's very little forethought or intellectual justification: "Oh, look, I'm putting in a theme park because that represents dystopian America!"