“Though it may be interesting to know how many hairs there are on the human head, or how the giant red spot on the surface of Jupiter was formed, the real truths we are interested in are those about ourselves.”

“Fiction may be about lying – on the surface, anyway – but fiction is about hiding the truth behind those lies. It's about using those lies to say something true and real. It's about showing the reader something. It's about making them feel.And how we do that as authors is to put ourselves into our work, and make it mean something to us, so that it will mean something to the reader. That's what we should do. That's our job.”

“It's creepy to know that we're living in a giant tube.""Hey, if you think about it, we were living on the surface of a big ball of rock. How was that better?”

“It is curious how little interested we are in the sexual desires of those who do not attract us.”

“I'm not interested in how things were, or how we ended up where we are now. What interests me is what we are now and what we will be.”

“Just how difficult it is to write biography can be reckoned by anybody who sits down and considers just how many people know the real truth about his or her love affairs.”