I'm a great believer in gathering together all your obsessions and seeing if you can make a novel out of them.

It's not even a question of whether the universe is meaningful or meaningless. It's in what way could it be meaningful, or in what way, if it was meaningful, could that be even more meaningless than normal meaninglessness?

Living for ever would be like marrying yourself, with no possibility of a divorce.

I wonder at what point my life swerved to avoid that, and if that life would have been nicer than the one I've got.

In real life nothing means anything. Stuff happens and there just is no structure.

You can't do science in a novel, but you can do philosophy. Or, if you're really lucky, you can manage to pose a question in such a way that other people will take it on.

I erased the thought from my mind, but I couldn't undo the fact that I'd had the thought in the first place.