Just when you think you've hit rock bottom, you realize you're standing on another trapdoor.

Good bands you can kind of lose, then come back and realize they're still good.

There was quantum mechanics, string theory, and then there was the most mind-bending frontier of the natural world, women.

What, really, was the difference between something hounding you and something leading you somewhere?

I believe writers need to be chameleons, or like Meryl Streep, who can play all sorts of characters. A good writer should be able to cross gender lines and people of all social classes. So for me, writing from a male point of view would be a great challenge, that I would look forward to taking on.

I haven't always been a writer and I suppose I tiptoed around the idea of writing full time, because it's so isolating.

It was what accidental deaths did to people, made everybody's sea floor irregular and uneven, causing tidal currents to collide, surge upward, thereby resulting in small yet volatile eddies churning at everybody's surface. (In the more dangerous cases, it created a lasting whirlpool in which the strongest swimmers could drown.)