So, whenever I'm writing, I'm writing in the presence of all the other books I've read and I think we all are.

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.

Cultivate the habit of defining, refining, redefining and redeeming your opportunities. Failure is a temporal event, not a permanent trademark.

Boredom is your soul's way of telling you to step up and do what you were born to.

Turn your stumbling blocks into stepping stones.

I didn't want to take the guitar solos down note-for-note, but more or less use them as a map, and keep all the hooks from the guitar playing, and let myself come through.

You don't restore 'The Last Supper' by filling in the missing bits - you preserve. You accept the material that has somehow survived.

The people in your life are important. Meaningful relationships with those people are very important.

The world would be a pretty dull place if it were made up only of the first-rate, right?

I'd like to go back to standup. I don't like to think I've done my last gig. At the moment it terrifies me, I get really nervous. It's a great buzz when it goes well.

Time never runs backward when I need it to. Not for me, and not for anyone else.

Artists are in the imagining/ prototyping business. Society needs people to be out there thinking of what might be. That cannot be something we just delegate to politicians or technologists.