Ambition robs you of your childhood. The moment you want to become an adult—in any way—something in your childhood dies.

Just when you begin thinking of yourself as memorable, you run into someone who can't even remember having met you

To each other, we were as normal and nice as the smell of bread. We were just a family. In a family even exaggerations make perfect sense.

I begin with an interest in a relationship, a situation, a character.

If you feel so strongly about what's on television, don't have one.

I certainly think Obama is the most hopeful president I've seen in the country since John Kennedy.

You bet I write disaster fiction. We have compiled a disastrous record on this planet, a record of stupidity and absurdity and self-abuse and self-aggrandizement and self-deception and pompousness and self-righteousness and cruelty and indifference beyond what any other species has demonstrated the capacity for, which is the capacity for all the above.