Free-form games in which the player can make choices about what the game is going to be, become a kind of gaming equivalent of the narrative possibility.

Very often, people who actually pick up a book of mine for the first time are kind of surprised. And I get these letters saying, well, who knew that you were good, you know?

You've got a generation of young men - almost all are young men - in situations of great economic hardship, where they don't really have work. The chances of them making a decent life for themselves, of making a family, living in a kind of decent, happy way, are very, very remote. It's very hard for them to ever even have that as a dream, so when people are that deprived of the ordinary hope of human beings, it creates anger. And that anger can be channeled by unscrupulous persons, whether secular or religious leaders, and there's been a lot of that.

We were language's magpies by nature, stealing whatever sounded bright and shiny.

How to forgive the world for its beauty, which merely disguises its ugliness; for its gentleness, which merely cloaks its cruelty; for its illusion of continuity, seamlessly, as the night follows the day, so to speak- whereas in reality life is a series of brutal raptures, falling upon your defenseless hands, like the blows of a woodman's axe?

Discovery is fun. I am incredibly open to everything.

Too many people spouting too many words, and in the end those words will turn to bullets and stones.