I feel that working environmentalists are, in the main, happier than armchair environmentalists.

Robin turned and looked straight into her. "What's life for?" "I don't know." "I don't either. But I don't think it's about winning.

Even in an intensely mediated world, in a world that offers at least the illusion of radical self-invention and radical freedom of choice, I as a novelist am drawn to the things you can't get away from. Because much of the promise of radical self-invention, of defining yourself through this marvelous freedom of choice, it's just a lie. It's a lie that we all buy into, because it helps the economy run.

And Silence of the Lambs is a really smart book.

But nothing disturbs the feeling of specialness like the presence of other human beings feeling identically special.

I don't personally like the e-readers they've come up with so far. I don't fetishize books, but I do like that they're solid and unchanging.

For every reader who dies today, a viewer is born, and we seem to be witnessing . . . the final tipping balance.