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

In her mind's eye she saw it, saw it all at last: the rolling armies and the flames of battle; the graves and pits and dying cries of a hundred million souls; the spreading darkness, like a black wing stretching over the earth; the last, bitter hours of cruelty and sorrow, and the terrible, final flights; death's great dominion over all, and, at the last, empty cities, becalmed by the silence of a hundred years. Already these things were coming to pass.

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.

I was a 'Planet of the Apes'-obsessed kid.

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.

Don't we all deserve forgiveness? I hope we do; I believe we do. Forgiveness says as much about the character of the person bestowing it as the person receiving it. Learning to forgive may be the most difficult of human acts,and the closest thing to divinity, whatever you decide that is.

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