There are no such things as happy endings. Never. They're totally manufactured by fiction writers who choose to end the story on a high point.

Truth usually makes no sense. If your desire is for everything to make perfect sense, then you should take refuge in fiction. In fiction, all threads tie together in a neat bow and everything moves smoothly from one point to the next to the next. In real life, though... nothing makes sense. Bad things happen to good people. The pious die young while the wicked live until old age. War, famine, pestilence, death all occur randomly and senselessly and leave us more often than not scratching our heads and hurling the question 'why?' into a void that provides no answers.

What do we think of sex on television? Frankly, I think it's a pain. For one thing, the cable box gets wedged into your back and gets real uncomfortable.

Maybe science is just magic with delusions of lack of grandeur.

As for jokes, I don't think it's necessarily that what I write is funny.

At conventions, one of the standard questions I get is, 'Are you writing any new novels?' To which I used to respond, in my smart-[alec] fashion, 'No, I've decided to write only old novels.'

We're all of us dying . . . from the moment we're born