You have to make sure you have the characters you want. That's really the most complicated part.

We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were.

In the absence of a natural disaster we are left again to our own uneasy devices.

I just read everything I could get my hands on. I taught myself to read or my mother taught me. Who knows how I learned to read? It was before I went to school, so I would go to the library and just take things off the shelf. My mother had to sign a piece of paper saying I could take adult books.

The fancy that extraterrestrial life is by definition of a higher order than our own is one that soothes all children, and many writers.

I came into adult life equipped with an essentially romantic ethic.

We tell ourselves stories in order to live. We live entirely by the impression of a narrative line upon disparate images, the shifting phantasmagoria, which is our actual experience.