I came to Houston for a job, the reason most people move halfway across the country with a first grader and a five-week-old. I came here to teach at Rice.

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.

Our identity in the world is like a wave from the Ocean.

Those who know who one should die knew how one should live.

My feathered friends were so much to me that I am constantly tempted to make this sketch of my first years a book about birds and little else.

Unencountered Language is the court and spark between words we recognize and those we don't.

Know that nothing can hinder you but yourself. If you believe you can, you can.

All I ask is equal freedom. When it is denied, as it always is, I take it anyhow.

Honor begets honor; trust begets trust; faith begets faith; and hope is the mainspring of life.

I don't believe Spiro Agnew is a crook. If he was a crook, he'd still be in office.

Apologies mean nothing if you don't mean it.

I want to live in Kolkata; I don't want to live in Europe - I can't write there. I write in Bengali, and I need to be surrounded by the Bengali language and culture.