If you were a real fascistic society and you had a vocal minority that was shouting, "Stop this, stop that, stop the other thing," what you would say is, "Let's give them all the drugs they want." In a lot of states, something very much like that happened. They lowered the drinking age to eighteen and said, "Get juiced."

The multiple choices of possibilities of daily life are the music we dance to.

Writing fiction, especially a long work of fiction, can be a difficult, lonely job; it's like crossing the Atlantic Ocean in a bathtub. There's plenty of opportunity for self-doubt.

The mind can calculate, but the spirit yearns, and the heart knows what the heart knows

Overhead was a sky blacker than jewlers' velvet, and a billion stars screamed down.

Sometimes the things presented to us as choices aren't choices at all.

The shuddering would not stop. The pain was like the end of the world. He thought: There comes a point when the very discussion of pain becomes redundant. No one knows there is pain the size of this in the world. No one. It is like being possessed by demons.