Because that's what heaven is...it's opening the door of a house in twilight and everyone you love is there.

If you are writing any book about the end of the world, what you are really writing about is what's worth saving about it.

Behind every writer stands a very large bookshelf.

My inventing time is all done under the influence of aerobic exercise. Basically, I do all my thinking while I run.

I grew up during the Cold War, when everything seemed very tenuous. For many years, right up until the fall of the Berlin Wall, I had vivid nightmares of nuclear apocalypse.

We live, we die. Somewhere along the way, if we're lucky, we may find someone to help lighten the load.

This ravishing world. This achingly bittersweet, ravishing world.

I have any number of completely dark obsessions and fascinations, and none of this was present in my profile or my growing profile as a writer.

What strange places our lives can carry us to, what dark passages.

My theory of characterization is basically this: Put some dirt on a hero, and put some sunshine on the villain, one brush stroke of beauty on the villain.

My rule has always been, write the next part of the book that you seem to know well. So I won't necessarily write chapter two after chapter one.

For truth is always strange

With patient, you shall possess your soul.

From an illustration in her "Animals of a Bygone Era": a Leptictidium, an extinct rabbit-like animal who left no descendants, says: "Too bad, because we were really cute.

There is perhaps no phenomenon which contains so much destructive feeling as 'moral indignation, ' which permits envy or hate to be acted out under the guise of virtue.

This will be a good time for poetry, you know, when things get darker and stranger and your very speech is being questioned and the sense of trusting that human thing.

All the time, I've felt that life is a wager and that I probably was getting more out of leading a bohemian existence as a writer than I would have if I didn't.

Those who seek liberation want to go beyond individualized perception. The essence of their being wants to dissolve back into the cosmos.

The miracle of enlightenment is that you take the self and let it dissolve in the white light of eternity.

Out of 135 criminals, including robbers and rapists, 118 admitted that when they were children they burned, hanged and stabbed domestic animals.

An actor works with their soul and their thought