It was possible, he understood, for a person's life to become just a long series of mistakes, and that the end, when it came, was just one more mistake in a chain of bad choices. The thing was, most of these mistakes were actually borrowed from other people. You took their bad ideas, and for whatever reason, made them your own.

If you are writing any book about the end of the world, what you are really writing about is what's worth saving about it.

I'm a workmanlike writer. I show up every day and treat it like a job. The old rule that writing is like any other job, the first rule is that you must show up. I'm at the keyboard from 9 to 4 every day.

As long as we remember a person, they're not really gone. Their thoughts, their feelings, their memories, they become a part of us.

And I grew up on a steady diet of science fiction, especially apocalyptic and postapocalyptic fiction.

What strange places our lives can carry us to, what dark passages.

It was what you did, Wolgast understood; you started to tell a story about who you were, and soon enough the lies were all you had and you became that person.