I'm quite proud of what I anticipated about reality television from my books in the early '90s, which I based on the early seasons of 'Cops' and on the amazing stuff I had read about happening on Japanese shows and the British 'Big Brother'.

Laney had recently noticed that the only people who had titles that clearly described their jobs had jobs he wouldn't have wanted.

The most common human act that writing a novel resembles is lying. The working novelist lies daily, very complexly, and at great length.

Enlightenment is "being," and it grows; it's end is serenity.

Dreaming in public is an important part of our job description, as science writers, but there are bad dreams as well as good dreams. We're dreamers, you see, but we're also realists, of a sort.

I think that I've always written about things that are very personal, but initially, I coded everything.

I'm very primitive in terms of economics. The kind of new business in which stock gets more valuable because the company grows, but there must be limits to growth. But if publishing is expanding to fill that retail space, it seems like there may be a necessary and unpleasant correction waiting down the road. How many books to people WANT?