What is hardest to accept about the passage of time is that the people who once mattered the most to us wind up in parentheses.

wherever the TV glows, there sits someone who isn't reading.

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

I have no respect for the right-to-life position, though I have every respect for an individual who says, "I could never have that procedure, I could never see a film or read a book about that procedure." It doesn't bother me if people feel that way.

The lie, of course, is more interesting.

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.

People are either attracted to the unseemly or disapproving of it, or both; yet we try to sound superior to the unseemly by pretending to be amused by it or indifferent to it.