Sara waited a respectful time, knowing there was nothing she could do to ease the woman's pain. Grief was a place, Sara understood, where a person went alone. It was like a room without doors, and what happened in that room, all the anger and the pain you felt, was meant to stay there, nobody's business but yours.

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

We live, we die. Somewhere along the way, if we're lucky, we may find someone to help lighten the load.

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.

Even on the darkest night, my friend, life will have its way.

So, whenever I'm writing, I'm writing in the presence of all the other books I've read and I think we all are.

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.