I was suffering from the delusion that it's the thought that counts.

It was important to me to put together a future history that would scan, and serve as the backdrop to the domestic story. Economics is really what drives the plot.

Though it may be more romantic to picture the bereaved as gaunt, I imagine you can grieve as efficiently with chocolates as with tap water.

Yet Irina had once tucked away, she wasn't sure when or why, that happiness is almost definitionally a condition of which you are not aware at the time. To inhabit your own contentment is to be wholly present, with no orbiting satellite to take clinical readings of the state of the planet. Conventionally, you grow conscious of happiness at the very point that it begins to elude you. When not misused to talk yourself into something - when not a lie - the h-word is a classification applied in retrospect. It is a bracketing assessment, a label only decisively pasted onto an era once it is over.

...whenever a woman describes a man as sweet, the dalliance is doomed.

it is always difficult to impress the ignorant.

One of my problems with terrorism is that it's self-evidently bad. The main thing that makes it complicated is the fact that it works. When you go at it with a moral hammer, it's really, really bad. It's so bad you wouldn't believe it because you don't accomplish anything. I think the one thing terrorists themselves are vulnerable to is mockery. It's an excellent weapon.