It's hard for me to believe that a shy, bespectacled college graduate like Brad Meltzer who's a novelist and a father is a really setting out to be weirdly misogynistic.

I can always see ways to improve what I've done. At the same time, knowing it's all an ongoing life's work allows me to be less precious about blind alleys, failed experiments, and misfires.

I use everything. Turning life into stories is how I make sense of my experience. No matter how weird or disturbing or upsetting to me personally, it all finds its way in there.

Performing magic has a lot to do with the arrangement of apparent coincidences and providing pathways along which desires can travel, or, to put it in more basic terms, there's little point in sigilizing for a lottery win if you don't also buy a lottery ticket.

Look at us! Are we not proof that there is no good, no evil, no truth, no reason? Are we not proof that the universe is a drooling idiot with no fashion sense - Mr Nobody on the fundamental philosophy of the Brotherhood of DADA

I just wanted all the wars to be over so that we could spend the money on starships and Mars colonies.

We tell our children they're trapped like rats on a doomed, bankrupt, gangster-haunted planet with dwindling resources, with nothing to look forward to but rising sea levels and imminent mass extinctions, then raise a disapproving eyebrow when, in response, they dress in black, cut themselves with razors, starve themselves, gorge themselves, or kill one another.