He had noticed that events were cowards: they didn't occur singly, but instead they would run in packs and leap out at him all at once.

The strangest part of being so well known is definitely getting a New Yorker profile. It's a wonderful, strange process, like seeing yourself through a distorting mirror.

I really like being able to laugh at my own jokes.

We live in a world in which the only utopian visions arrive in commercial breaks: magical visions of an impossibly hospitable world, peopled by bright-eyed attractive men, women, children... Where nobody dies... In my worlds people died. And I thought that was honest. I thought I was being honest.

The search for the word gets no easier but nobody else is going to write your novel for you.

Childhood memories are sometimes covered and obscured beneath the things that come later, like childhood toys forgotten at the bottom of a crammed adult closet, but they are never lost for good.

Idris: Are all people like this? The Doctor: Like what? Idris: So much bigger on the inside.