I think if there hadn't been the one passage of the book that mostly abandons the humor, and focuses very intently on one person's struggle with cancer, it wouldn't have been a critical success. So that was a very deliberate decision, to say "Well, if you think it's all fun and games, it's not." So that was my approach: We're going to have as much fun as I can possibly provide, but the serious things that might normally pass by you are not going to be lost.

I believe people think as a group more often than we might realize or care to admit. We like to believe that we act as individuals and nothing more, but time and again - in corporations and business, in politics and religion, in fashion and culture, and in friendships and social circles - we think and do as one.

Humor is a very big part of life, and if you exclude humor from your book, you're not capturing a very important part of human experience.

I have never stopped considering not becoming a writer.

Things could be worse and things could be so much better.

We suffered failures of imagination just like everyone else, our daring was wanting, and our daily contentment too nearly adequate for us to give it up.

Being serious is serious business in fiction. It's commercial or hoi polloi in fiction to be funny. It's too accessible to the great unwashed.