In terms of a "career," I never have long-term plans, and certainly don't want to spend several years, say, writing a "long" novel.

I can’t think of a more philosophical time in a person’s life than when they are children. It’s the one time when ideas are really beautiful and amazing and all-encompassing. They are life.

The body, I have often thought, is like a promise. You keep things in it. Those things are covert, immediate, yours. There is something lustrous about them. They emit energy, like radium or appliances. They can be replaced, repaired or simply discarded. The promise of the body is very firm and intact. It's the only promise we can count on, and we can't really count on it very much.

I am not especially good at remembering the actualities of the world I inhabit, but I have pretty strong associative memories of how it feels to live in that world, and to wonder at its weird machinations, at any age.

Life is a sweet mistake that happened when the world wasn't looking.

In terms of a "career," I never have long-term plans, and certainly don't want to spend several years, say, writing a "long" novel.

For years (decades even), I genuinely believed that world would beat a path to my books and stories, but eventually, as everything I wrote went rapidly out of print and stayed there, I wised up and started assembling them in e-format editions...