I'm always the one with the activist friends. I've been an activist very little.

Then I fell in love and everything went to hell.

I had known loneliness before, and emptiness upon the moor, but I had never been a NOTHING, a nothing floating on a nothing, known by nothing, lonelier and colder than the space between the stars. It was more frightening than being dead.

I thought I would be an organic chemist. I went off to university, and when I couldn't understand the chemistry lectures I decided that I would be a zoologist, because zoologists seemed like life-loving people.

I'm interested in where we are, where we're going, where we've come from.

It's like standing on the edge of a cliff. This is especially true of the first draft. Every day you're making up the earth you're going to stand on.

One has to be able to twist and change and distort characters, play with them like clay, so everything fits together. Real people don't permit you to do that.