Long after the bomb falls and you and your good deeds are gone, cockroaches will still be here, prowling the streets like armored cars.

I felt my whole life was a facsimile of a life.

Every book I write, the media just keeps punching me in the face.

I feel like I sort of missed the eighties. At the time, we didn't know we were having fun, which is probably the way it always is.

I think the sixties must have been quite a lot of fun.

With publicity comes humiliation.

On bad days, I think I'd like to be a plastic surgeon who goes to Third World countries and operates on children in villages with airlifts, and then I think, 'Yeah, right, I'm going to go back to undergraduate school and take all the biology I missed and then go to medical school.' No. No.

Whether I'm critically well received, whether or not I sell books - of course it becomes progressively harder to get them published - nevertheless, it's what I do, every day.