Some questions will ruin you if you are denied the answer long enough.

Who had the bigger burden? The one who had to watch the other person endure or the one who endured?

It is the nature of the writer to question the validity of his world and yet rely on his senses to describe it. From what other tension can great literature be born?

We should feel an urgency about our environment and what's been done to it by human action and inaction. I wouldn't say there's a resurgence - I think it's been with us all along, and especially since the 1960s and 1970s, but it is true that there's almost a subsection of the bookstore devoted to it now. Personally, I've been addressing these issues in my long and short fiction since the late 1980s - basically since the beginning of my career.

I had learned so much about the world that I had decided to withdraw from it.

There's also a lot of gritty Americana type of bands. I actually have a lot of Britpop on my iPod, too.

You can either waste time worrying about a death that might not come or concentrate on what’s left to you.