We want to know that we're not alone with our loneliness or loss.

Science is claiming ever more ground from popular stories of the kind we thought we weren't to believe in.

I seem always to have two or three novels going at once. It takes me a long time to finish one.

We're getting used to reality and fantasy passing into each other. Much of the border between them has been erased.

Novels seem to exist because of this need to know and connect, and so story becomes charged with necessity.

It's fiction's job to express how it feels to be living now, and it's a complex feeling, full of contradiction. To me it often feels like a brutal trivialization of reality.

There's some evidence that before events of mass trauma, even unpredictable ones, people begin to feel higher anxiety, often expressed in terms specific to the event.