“Books are a bad family - there are those you love, and those you are indifferent to; idiots and mad cousins who you would banish except others enjoy their company; wrongheaded but fascinating eccentrics and dreamy geniuses; orphaned grandchildren; and endless brothers-in-law simply taking up space who you wish you could send straight to hell. Except you can't, for the most part. You must house them and make them comfortable and worry about them when they go on trips and there is never enough room.”

“When I was in college, I wrote poetry very seriously, and then once I had started writing short stories, I didn't go back to poetry, partially because I felt like I understood how incredibly difficult it was.”

“There's a good chance that in 40 years, after the floods, people zipping by on scavenged jetpacks with their scavenged baseball caps on backwards, I will be in my rocking chair saying bitterly, 'I remember when 'all right' was two words.'”

“It's an amazing thing to watch a lizard fold a moth into its mouth, like a sword swallower who specialises in umbrellas.”

“I wanted to acknowledge that life goes on but that death goes on, too. A person who is dead is a long, long story.”

“For about half an hour in mid-1992, I knew as much as any layperson about the pleasures of remote access of other people's computers.”

“Short fiction is like low relief. And if your story has no humor in it, then you're trying to look at something in the pitch dark. With the light of humor, it throws what you're writing into relief so that you can actually see it.”

“You write the way you think about the world. My motto in times of trouble - and I'm speaking of life, not writing - is 'no humor too black.'”

“Humor reminds you, when you're flattened by sorrow, that you're still human.”

“Do not trust an architect: he will always try to talk you into an atrium.”

“Grief lasts longer than sympathy, which is one of the tragedies of the grieving.”