What I'm constantly striving for in my prose is clarity. So that, ideally, the writing will become so transparent that the reader will forget that the medium of communication is language.

I try not to become too regular an addict of any one subculture.

I never take any notes or draw charts or make elaborate diagrams, but I hold an image of the shape of a book in my head and work from that mental hologram.

I've never related to the work geek at all-it sounds much more horrible than nerd. Like a freak biting a chicken's head off in a sideshow.

I learned to write fiction the way I learned to read fiction - by skipping the parts that bored me.

Someday I would change my name to Shut Up and save everybody a lot of time.

I work on a laptop specifically so I can work in cafes and pretend I'm part of the human world.

What age is a black boy when he learns he's scary?

It was only as I wrote about fear that I began to find paths of access to feelings that were intolerable to me then.

I want what we all want," said Carl. "To move certain parts of the interior of myself into the exterior world, to see if they can be embraced.

I can't bear the silent ringing in my skull.

If I can sell out clubs and theaters and play dirtbags in movies, and get blown up in a car or get the crap beat out of me in a movie, that's good for me; I'm good.

Physics grapples with the largest questions the universe presents. Where did the totality of reality come from? Did time have a beginning?

The shivering birds beneath the eaves Have sheltered for the night.

I am an American citizen born in Kuwait of Egyptian parents. I grew up in Great Britain, Malaysia, and Egypt and have lived in the United States since 1965, when I was seventeen.

Courage, like cowardice, is undoubtedly contagious, but some persons are not liable to catch it.

Trying to seduce Alec at all was a waste of time; he came preseduced anyway. Like a microwave entrée. You pressed his buttons, and he got hot.

But the validity of a doctrine does not depend on whose ox it gores.

I guess I watch more MTV than you do. I'm a junkie for it.

The notion of illegal plants and animals is obnoxious and ridiculous.