I think that friendship always makes us feel such sweet gratitude, because the world almost always seems like a very hard desert, and the flowers that grow there seem to grow against such high odds.

A successful novel should interrupt the reader’s life, make him or her miss appointments, skip meals, forget to walk the dog.

When we blew the first atomic bomb at White Sands near the end of the war, nobody knew what was going to happen. There was a theory that the chain reaction would continue forever. And we would have created a little tiny sun out there in the desert that would burn until the end of the universe. It wasn't a widely held theory but it was a theory that nobody had a way of disproving. There were people who thought it wouldn't go off at all, that it would simply sit out there and melt and produce a great big dirty cloud of radioactivity. Nobody knew.

Kids absolutely not reading. I think it's because they're so screen-oriented [TVs, computers, smartphones]. They do read - girls in particular read a lot. They have a tendency to go toward the paranormal, romances, Twilight and stuff like that. And then it starts to taper off because other things take precedence, like the Kardashian sisters.

He smiles a lot. But I think there might be worms inside him making him smile.

I always drank, from when it was legal for me to drink. And there was never a time for me when the goal wasn't to get as hammered as I could possibly afford to. I never understood social drinking, that's always seemed to me like kissing your sister.

They had discovered one could grow as hungry for light as for food.