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.

Perhaps its not the world that is soundless but we who are deaf.

I've never understood why people consider youth a time of freedom and joy. It's probably because they have forgotten their own.

When we're good, we're very, very good, and when we're bad, we're horrid. This is not news, because we're so much more inventive and we have two hands, the left and the right. That is how we think. It's all over our literature, and it's all over the way we arrange archetypes, the good version, the bad version, the god, the devil, the Abel, the Cain, you name it. We arrange things in pairs like that because we know about ourselves.

Science fiction is filled with Martians and space travel to other planets, and things like that.

They spent the first three years of school getting you to pretend stuff and then the rest of it marking you down if you did the same thing.

I'm working on my own life story. I don't mean I'm putting it together; no, I'm taking it apart.