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

So perhaps the greatest worry of all was that one day you would realize that all the worries of your life amounted to one thing: the desire to just stop worrying.

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.

One of the traps or the pitfalls of writing a trilogy - or a triptych, or whatever term you want to use - is that the second book can be a long second act to get you from book one to book three, which borrows all of its energy from the first book.

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.

It had never occurred to her that God would cry, but of course that was wrong. God would be crying all the time. He would cry and cry and never stop.

There's an outline for each of the books that I adhere to pretty closely, but I'm not averse to taking it in a new direction, as long as I can get it back to where I need it to go.