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.

I grew up during the Cold War, when everything seemed very tenuous. For many years, right up until the fall of the Berlin Wall, I had vivid nightmares of nuclear apocalypse.

I have any number of completely dark obsessions and fascinations, and none of this was present in my profile or my growing profile as a writer.

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

One thing that worried me was how writers get categorized and so they end up having to write the same kind of book again and again. That is fine if it is what you want to do, but I would rather be locked in the trunk of my car with a weasel than write the same book every three years until I die.

My inventing time is all done under the influence of aerobic exercise. Basically, I do all my thinking while I run.

My rule has always been, write the next part of the book that you seem to know well. So I won't necessarily write chapter two after chapter one.