and each of his voices left his body in a different colored soul and floated up towards the sun still singing.

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.

We shouldn't be saying 'Save the planet'; we should be saying: 'Save viable conditions in which people can live.' That's what we're dealing with here.

Don't misunderstand me. I am not scoffing at goodness, which is far more difficult to explain than evil, and far more complicated. But sometimes it's hard to put up with.

My brother and I were both teenage writers, and he was, I have to say, better than I was, but he went into science, and I went into writing.

When I was 16, I started publishing all kinds of things in school magazines.

Nothing is more difficult than to understand the dead, I've found; but nothing is more dangerous than to ignore them.