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

I'm not even sure if empathy is an act, it could be a disposition.

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.

The idea that language can be recombined to create new forms, new things, is of course very old in poetry.

Absurdity isn't quite so absurd as it once was.

I like a great degree of compression. I like to mix lateral steps with forward ones. I don't want the prose ever to feel simply functional - at least not for any stretch.

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