I've moved away from that sort of deep-ecological extremism. I started to think: what can we do for wild birds right now? I don't want these particular species to disappear.

Nice people don't necessarily fall in love with nice people.

I was about 13, in some ways, when I wrote the first book. Approximately 18 when I wrote the second.

Fiction is a particularly effective way for strangers to connect across time and distance

Remind me again what's wrong with Dave Matthews?" "Basically everything, except technical proficiency," Walter said. "Right." "But maybe especially the banality of the lyrics. 'Gotta be free, so free, yeah, yeah, yeah. Can't live without my freedom, yeah yeah.' That's pretty much every song.

But she was seventeen now and not actually dumb. She knew that you could love somebody more than anything and still not love the person all that much, if you were busy with other things.

Twitter is unspeakably irritating. Twitter stands for everything I oppose.