My theory of characterization is basically this: Put some dirt on a hero, and put some sunshine on the villain, one brush stroke of beauty on the villain.

The fact is, there's a great deal of hair-splitting fussiness when it comes to fly-fishing, most of it as silly as a top hat.

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.

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

I came to Houston for a job, the reason most people move halfway across the country with a first grader and a five-week-old. I came here to teach at Rice.

I like to break left when people think I'm going to go right.

It happened fast. Thirty-two minutes for one world to die, another to be born.