“Perhaps it goes without saying that I believe in the geographic cure. Of course you can't out-travel sadness. You will find it has smuggled itself along in your suitcase. It coats the camera lens, it flavors the local cuisine. In that different sunlight, it stands out, awkward, yours, honking in the brash vowels of your native tongue in otherwise quiet restaurants. You may even feel proud of its stubbornness as it follows you up the bell towers and monuments, as it pants in your ear while you take in the view. I travel not to get away from my troubles but to see how they look in front of famous buildings or on deserted beaches. I take them for walks. Sometimes I get them drunk. Back at home we generally understand each other better.”

“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.”