I think that writers are, at best, outsiders to the society they inhabit. They have a kind of detachment, or try to have.

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.

A sentence boiled in her, but she could not yet see it clearly.

I suppose I'm proudest of my novels for what's imagined in them. I think the world of my imagination is a richer and more interesting place than my personal biography.

The main character and the most important character are not always the same person - you have to know the difference.

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

The powerful wind swept his hair away from his face; he leaned his chest into the wind, as if he stood on the deck of a ship heading into the wind, slicing through the waves of an ocean he’d not yet seen.