“Imagine a world in which there is no time. Only images.”

All writers have roots they draw from – travel, work, family. My roots are in science and it is fertile ground for fiction.

Sexual arousal is no more than a flow of chemicals to certain nerve endings.

It is a world of impulse. It is a world of sincerity.

I would bet most people don’t have thirty minutes in a day where they can just sit down and think. Or maybe they don’t have to be sitting, they can be walking.

It’s not necessarily a large number of people that affect the culture. You don’t count the number of influential voices, you weigh them. A hundred people can affect the culture.

The Book of Telling tells of a woman’s journey to uncover the secret life of her father and to find herself in the process.

If a person holds ambitions, he suffers knowingly, but very slowly.

That has been the great achievement of our age: to so thoroughly flood the planet with megabits that every image and fact has become a digitized disembodied nothingness. With magnificent determination,

The first is as rigid and metallic as a massive pendulum of iron that swings back and forth, back and forth, back and forth.

I would do something and let it sit for three months… just brood about and decide I needed to slightly change something here or there. Or one character wasn’t quite right. But I think everybody goes through this.

To the point that I have to be careful that they don’t take over.

You can’t let your characters just be mouthpieces for your ideas. They have to live and breathe on their own.

Authenticity and sincerity were the most important unifying principles of all these apparently different essays.

In a world without future, each parting of friends is a death. In a world without future, each loneliness is final.

The book is finished by the reader. A good novel should invite the reader in and let the reader participate in the creative experience and bring their own life experiences to it, interpret with their own individual life experiences.

Unconditional love. That’s what he wants to give her and what he wants from her. People should give without wanting anything in return.

New York waiters, probably the surliest in the Western world . . . are better images of their city than that journalistic favorite the taxi driver.

I confront the European elite’s self-image as tolerant ‘while under their noses women are living like slaves.

At this level, only images connect. And here, story becomes symbol; symbol is myth. And myth is truth.

I’m an angry person, angrier than most people would imagine, I get flashes of anger.

And then there are encouragements to use heterosexual pornography or heterosexual images to encourage heterosexual attraction.

The image and the costs of a Berlin-like wall or a Great Wall of China is something that the American people have not accepted to date.

The image is a great reminder how we create our world through interpretations made up of language and symbols.

The image foreigners have of French cuisine is fattening and very fancy food. But it’s not true – French food isn’t just rich. The word “healthy” doesn’t exist in French.