If the novelist isn't surprised by where his book ends up, he or she probably hasn't written anything worth remembering.

The female characters in my books tend to be independent, frisky, spunky, witty, emotionally strong, erotically daring, spiritually oriented and intellectually generous; in short, the kind of women I admire in real life.

Summer had come to sit on New York's face.

In times of widespread chaos and confusion, it has been the duty of more advanced human beings--artists, scientists, clowns and philosophers--to create order. In times such as ours, however, when there is too much order, too much management, too much programming and control, it becomes the duty of superior men and women to fling their favorite monkey wrenches into the machinery. To relive the repression of the human spirit, they must sow doubt and disruption.

I'll bet I'm as old as you are." "I'm older than Sanskrit." "Well, I was waitress at the Last Supper." "I'm so old I remember when McDonald's had only sold a hundred burgers." "You win.

And it rained a fever. And it rained a silence. And it rained a sacrifice. And it rained a miracle. And it rained sorceries and saturnine eyes of the totem.

If you want to make a name for yourself, the oldest trick in the book is to attack what everybody else reveres.