Fiction is a solution, the best solution, to the problem of existential solitude.

It's healthy to say uncle when your bone's about to break.

Depression presents itself as a realism regarding the rottenness of the world in general and the rottenness of your life in particular. But the realism is merely a mask for depression's actual essence, which is an overwhelming estrangement from humanity. The more persuaded you are of your unique access to the rottenness, the more afraid you become of engaging with the world; and the less you engage with the world, the more perfidiously happy-faced the rest of humanity seems for continuing to engage with it.

The problem with making a virtual world of oneself is akin to the problem with projecting ourselves onto a cyberworld: there’s no end of virtual spaces in which to seek stimulation, but their very endlessness, the perpetual stimulation without satisfaction, becomes imprisoning.

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

The world was ending then, it's ending still, and I'm happy to belong to it again.

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