Plague has hung over human history. The biggest human extinction was after 1492 in North and South America when the mortality rate was 95 per cent, which is enormous. But again, I'm actually giving you grounds for optimism: There were enough to continue. The five per cent who made it through are what you need to survive a bottleneck, which we have been through before.

I am rather saddened at the end of a book. I think most writers find this. It's like a friend departing on a voyage.

You need a certain amount of nerve to be a writer, an almost physical nerve, the kind you need to walk a log across a river.

I tried to visualize my jealousy as a yellowy-brown cloud boiling around inside me, then going out through my nose like smoke and turning into a stone and falling down into the ground. That did work a little. But in my visualization a plant covered with poison berries would grow out of the stone, whether I wanted it to or not.

Nobody dies from lack of sex. It's lack of love we die from.

Kafka thought his stories were hilarious. We don't necessarily have that reaction to them, but he certainly laughed his head off every time he read them out loud.

You're never going to kill storytelling, because it's built into the human plan. We come with it.