The etiquette of blurbs means it's not hard to not blurb something (if it's not by a friend, or student): everyone knows how many books you're deluged with. You can just say you never got to it.

It turns out that our intuition is a greater genius than we are.

The longer you go by yourself the weirder you get, and the weirder you get the longer you go by yourself.

I think there's a playfulness and a distance to Kavalier and Clay that I don't aspire to in my stuff. Maybe I'm more old-fashioned, and less of a fabulist, in that way.

What makes us threaten the things we want most?

She thought she'd put up with however many years of stonewalling for a good reason, and she'd just figured out that as far as Castle Hubby went, she hadn't even crossed the moat yet.

I do find stories - or literary fiction - an apt form for analyzing the world. And especially for trying to imagine the other. An agenda, again, that seems more important now than ever.

I think fiction is all about the exercise of the empathetic imagination. Part of what I do is let the stuff I read about meld with what I have experienced.

Disasters occur organically in my work, in that that's the way my thinking tends, more than that's what I start out by planning. I'm sort of a catastrophist.

I very much like people. I don't much like writers who don't.

Class is the most taboo subject in America. The American media would rather talk about race or perversion or anything else considered taboo before class.

Busy people are never busybodies.

Patience has its limits. Take it too far, and it's cowardice.

I am a very mediocre intellect, at best, and I am smarter than most people I know - and that terrifies me.

The capacity of any conqueror is more likely than not to be an illusion produced by the incapacity of his adversary.

Cheating in school is a form of self-deception. We go to school to learn. We cheat ourselves when we coast on the efforts and scholarship of someone else.

You realize, this is not just a little studio we go to make these television episodes. This thing is reaching everybody in the world! Suddenly you realize the power of television.

In America, they want you to accomplish these great feats, to pull off these David Copperfield-type stunts. You want me to be great, but you don't ever want me to say I'm great?

Sin promises like a God but pays like a Devil

If you're looking for a book that will spike in sales and then go away and then spike again when it comes out in paperback, your normal model, I definitely won't give you that.

You know what, life is full of temptations