All fat women look the same; they all look 42.

The future of narrative? Built in, part of the human template. Not going away.

I am too old to have ever been very worried about what "genre" any given book of mine might be. I read everything. I am easily amused.

Don't eat anything you aren't prepared to kill. Don't kill anything you aren't prepared to eat.

Glenn used to say the reason you can't really imagine yourself being dead was that as soon as you say, 'I'll be dead,' you've said the word I, and so you're still alive inside the sentence. And that's how people got the idea of the immortality of the soul - it was a consequence of grammar.

The reason they invented coffins, to lock the dead in, preserve them, they put makeup on them; they didn't want them spreading or changing into anything else. The stone with the name and date was on them to weight them down.

Writing of the narrative kind, and perhaps all writing, is motivated deep down, by a fear or and fascination with mortality - by a desire to make the risky trip to the underworld and to bring something or someone back from the dead.