When we ask bureaucrats to identify who is responsible for fixing anything, they reassure us that there are 'procedures in place.'

Of course it's fun writing about an egomaniac, but I know there are going to be reviewers who've never met me, who don't know anything about me, who are going to say this is autobiography: he's just changed the names of a few people, and the rest is totally as it was.

The privileged Victorians who did most to improve the lives of the poor were not ashamed of their pious intent: they were superiors seeking to help inferiors.

I would love to have faith. When you take God out of the universe, there is no-one taking care us - we are just parcels of meat, collections of atoms - we have a little flowering on Earth, and then we're gone.

We don't do the avian flu. DMORT is responsible for [processing] the remains only ... they don't identify, they don't do autopsies -- those are done by local medical examiners. We aren't responsible for that.

Pathos and poignancy are, to me, tactics and techniques; in my work as a writer, I fetch them from my toolbox and use them as required.