Organizer is kind of a grand term for what I was doing. I answered an ad that the Presbyterian Church of Chicago put up on college campuses. I was at the University of Kansas, and it's somewhat relevant to my life and work that I'm a Jew. But they weren't doing a religious litmus test. They wanted energetic, civil-rights-committed college students to come help them run some summer programs.

Heart surgeons do not have the world's smallest egos: when you ask them to name the world's three leading practitioners, they never can remember the names of the other two.

I think Peter Dickinson is hands down the best stylist as a writer and the most interesting storyteller in my genre.

I went to college at the University of Kansas, where I got a degree in political science.

Nothing kinder than strangers. Nothing stranger than kindness.

People have less privacy and are crammed together in cities, but in the wide open spaces they secretly keep tabs on each other a lot more

I was reading Raymond Chandler very much with the feminist eye. In six of his seven novels, it's the woman who presents herself in a sexual way, who is the main bad person. And then you start reading more fiction, whether crime fiction or straight fiction, it's just bad girls trying to make good boys do bad things, going all the way back to Adam and Eve. The woman that thou gavest me made me do it, Adam says to God.