You learn to write by reading, and my experiences and tastes as a reader are pretty wide.

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.

I guess you could say I'm allergic to sunlight. If I'm exposed to it, it could kill me.

We brought nothing into this world and it is certain we can carry nothing out.

My theory about Taylor Swift is that she's a virgin, that everyone breaks up with her because they date her for two weeks and she's like, 'I'm not gonna do it'.

Is America ready for a black president? Well, I say we just had a retarded one. When did being black become a bigger deterrent than being retarded?

I've always been humble and this even humbled me even more to definitely get a second chance at my career. There are still chapters I'm writing in this legacy.

like any Irish mother, I am scar tissue to the bone.

Boycott brought about anyhow of British cloth cannot yield the same results as such boycott brought about by hand-spinning and khaddar.

Success is the next best thing to happiness, and if you can't be happy as a success, it's very unlikely that you would find a deeper, truer happiness in failure.

You have to discipline your children, or they won't respect you, law enforcement or God or anyone else.

Our resistance to this war should be our resistance to profit at the cost of human life. Because that is what these drums beating over Iraq are really about. This is about business.