Don't forget this, too: Rumors aren't interested in the unsensational story; rumors don't care what's true.

When I finally write the first sentence, I want to know everything that happens, so that I am not inventing the story as I write it - rather, I am remembering a story that has already happened.

Kids are perfect people till grownups get their hands on them.

I believe a novel should be as complicated and involved as you're capable of making it.

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.

If you presume to love something, you must love the process of it much more than you love the finished product.

It's a no-win argument - that business of what we're born with and what our environment does to us. And it's a boring argument, because it simplifies the mysteries that attend both our birth and our growth.