I think massive migration is inevitable. As sea levels rise, as climate change happens, as fertile fields become arid, as wars are fought, people are going to move. They always have.

All over the world, the nativist perspective is being privileged over those who are more recent arrivals.

We should be very skeptical of people who want to place limits on how we express ourselves.

When I'm really plugged in I find it difficult to write. It's like digging a well. If you make a void, something moves in to fill it. Writing books is like that. It's mostly about freeing up time, doing nothing, and in that time some writing starts to happen. We need to figure out how to maintain those voids.

Many boys, probably most boys, have a first love before they fall in love with a woman. It begins the moment two boys realize they'd die for one another, that each cares more for the other than he does for himself, and it lasts usually until a second love comes on the scene, because most hearts aren't big enough to love more than one person like that.

Literature helps us transcend ourselves.

We need a self because the complexity of the chemical processes that make up our individual humanities exceeds the processing power of our brains.