Every utopia - let's just stick with the literary ones - faces the same problem: What do you do with the people who don't fit in?

Our problem right now is that we're so specialized that if the lights go out, there are a huge number of people who are not going to know what to do. But within every dystopia there's a little utopia.

Anybody who writes a book is an optimist. First of all, they think they're going to finish it. Second, they think somebody's going to publish it. Third, they think somebody's going to read it. Fourth, they think somebody's going to like it. How optimistic is that?

The problem with meditating is I generally go to sleep, and that's because I'm doing it wrong.

You hear doom and gloom about the Internet ruining young people's command of English - that's nonsense.

If you feel that there's the author and then the character, then the book is not working. People have a habit of identifying the author with the narrator, and you can't, obviously, be all of the narrators in all of your books, or else you'd be a very strange person indeed.