Money's important. Everyone cares about money. And when you don't have money, money becomes the overriding obsession of your life.

I have difficulty orienting myself in space, and I'm probably one of the few people who gets lost in Manhattan.

I still believe we wasted a golden opportunity to make significant changes in our country. I think people in America would have been ready and willing to do it, but the Bush administration took a kind of simplistic, almost moronic approach to it, all because people were so afraid.

I don't think about the stories so much, as the characters themselves. They live on, and they are almost as real as I am.

It seems to me that I will always be happy in the place where I am not.

I knew from the age of 16 that I wanted to be a writer because I just didn't think I could do anything else. So I read and read and wrote short stories and dreamed of escape.

Each man, therefore, is the entire world, bearing within his genes a memory of all mankind. Or as Leibniz put it: ‘Every living substance is a perpetual living mirror of the universe’