I wonder if the reason I tend to say yes to everything is because I deeply believe that I can survive anything.

I hate stereotypes and I hate cliche.

People make events into stories. Stories give events meaning.

If something wants to be a story, it will be.

So if we're all quarks and electrons ..." he begins. What?" We could make love and it would be nothing more than quarks and electrons rubbing together." Better than that," I say. "Nothing really 'rubs together' in the microscopic world. Matter never really touches other matter, so we could make love without any of our atoms touching at all. Remember that electrons sit on the outside of atoms, repelling other electrons. So we could make love and actually repel each other at the same time.

I think predictability is built into any good novel in some way - you begin reading Anna Karenina and you know pretty much what's going to happen at the end. But that doesn't mean you know what's going to happen in the middle. For me, it's that sense of what happens in the middle that's important.

But I quite like the way you can talk about science without necessarily using mathematics, but using metaphors instead.