Drowning people Sometimes die Fighting their rescuers.

And I have this little litany of things they can do. And the first one, of course, is to write - every day, no excuses. It's so easy to make excuses. Even professional writers have days when they'd rather clean the toilet than do the writing.

You are hierarchical. That's the older and more entrenched characteristic. We saw it in your closest animal relatives and in your most distant ones. It's a terrestrial characteristic. When human intelligence served it instead of guiding it, when human intelligence did not even acknowledge it as a problem, but took pride in it or did not notice it at all... That was like ignoring cancer.

In my years, I have seen that people must be their own gods and make their own good fortune. The bad will come or not come anyway.

I wasn't trying to work out my own ancestry. I was trying to get people to feel slavery. I was trying to get across the kind of emotional and psychological stones that slavery threw at people.

No... a novel is a long business. I'm a slow writer, even when I'm doing very well I write slowly.

I just knew there were stories I wanted to tell.