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.

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.

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.

Christy has not been given a fair shake. She has not been identified as a competent premier.

Each of us has no peers, because each of us is unique in who we are and what we have experienced.Anyone who tells you otherwise has quite obviously not met any of their peers either!

You shouldn't blame others for the conditions you endure; we each have the freedom to follow which path we desire in life.

All generalizations are false, including this one.

Most women are dissatisfied with their appearance - it's the stuff that fuels the beauty and fashion industries.

People are too apt to treat God as if he were a minor royalty.

Most artists like to think of themselves as rugged individualists, as independent characters.

One needs to be slow to form convictions, but once formed they must be defended against the heaviest odds.

A terrible thing about getting oldish is that your friends start dying, and in the last ten years I have lost seven or eight of my closest.

People aren't going to throw the kind of money at certain people that they used to.

We live in a world of cause and effect.