I'm afraid of all kinds of things. I'm afraid of failing at whatever story I'm writing - that it won't come up for me, or that I won't be able to finish it.

Anything with the power to make you laugh over thirty years later isn’t a waste of time. I think something like that is very close to immortality.

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."

I like to get ten pages a day, which amounts to 2,000 words. That’s 180,000 words over a three-month span, a goodish length for a book — something in which the reader can get happily lost, if the tale is done well and stays fresh.

It wasn't just love that held people together. There was secrets, and the price you paid to keep them.

I have the world's best job. I get paid to hang out in my imagination all day.

It is the tale, not he who tells it.