You can't be careful on a skateboard.

I know your mother lives in your head - almost everyone's mother does, I guess - but you can't let her have her way on this one

Perfect paranoia is perfect awareness.

That was what I wanted, but I don't need it to be gone. I can love you and I can love life and bear the pain all at the same time. I think the pain might even make the rest better, the way a good setting can make a diamond look better.

I go where the story leads. And, sometimes, it is a little bit outrageous. And I relish that. I sort of want to be as much on the edge as I can.

Too often, in novels that are speculative, God is a kind of kryptonite, and that's about all that it is, and it goes back to Dracula, where someone dumps a crucifix in Count Dracula's face, and he pulls away and runs back into his house. That's not religion. That's some kind of juju, like a talisman.

I'm one of those people who doesn't really know what he thinks until he writes it down.