She smiled. “Life is full of stories. Or maybe life is only stories. Good night, my dear Nao.

An unfinished book. left unattended, turns feral, and she would need all her focus, will and ruthless determination to tame it again.

By the time we, consumers, are aware of processes like genetic engineering, they're already being done. It's sort of like the war in Iraq: By the time we know about it, it's almost a fait accompli. And that's certainly true with science.

It was really a means-of-production problem. It costs so much to make films. With a novel, you can write the whole thing on a ream of paper from Staples for $4.

Sometimes when she told stories about the past her eyes would get teary from all the memories she had, but they weren't tears. She wasn't crying. They were just the memories, leaking out.

Inspiration comes from everything from the entire world, and its hard to pinpoint one thing. I can trace one inspiration to the writing of 13th-century Zen master Dogen Zenji, who writes beautifully about time.

Information is a lot like water; it's hard to hold on to, and hard to keep from leaking away.