When we think of death, we often imagine it as happening in degrees: We think of a sick person becoming less and less alive until finally they are gone.
The miracle and hope of human consciousness is that we can still conceive of boundlessness.
Life works best when we think of people as people.
I change my keyboard between every book. I usually shop around. I'm very passionate about the physical feel of pressing the keys. It's got to have the right springiness. I tend to find the built-in keys very unsatisfying, the keys are low-profile and don't really do anything - I want it to feel like I'm typing.
I think all true stories are hopeful stories. I don't think there's any room for nihilism.
I'm interested in Internet cultures. I'm interested in what the teenagers who drive the Internet culture are passionate about. I follow their lead - they go to tumblr, I go to tumblr.
I think that it's a universal urge to have our pain not be felt alone and to have our joys not be felt alone.
I don't see any point in nihilism... just as I suppose the nihilist sees no point in everything else.
The universe is biased toward consciousness because the universe wants to be noticed. It's a way into existential hope that doesn't have too much cliché wrapped around it.
The nature of the love between a parent and child really is literally stronger than death. As long as either person in that relationship is alive, that relationship is still alive.
Becoming a father made me much more interested in the parent character in my novels. I've never found parents that interesting.
I think when you're 16, if you have good parents, they generally just fade in the background. I had great parents, and because they were great, I thought very little about them in high school.
One of the jobs of a writer is to add nuance and ambiguity to that straight line that people often draw to very specific kinds of heroism. Most of us don't get to be Snooki. For most of us heroism has to be in our everyday lives.
All good American literature is always interested in people who are ambiguously heroic, like Gatsby.
If we restructure things to see that the hero's journey is a degree in astrophysics rather than a journey to star in a reality show, that's a better world.
I don't think ministering requires a religious context. The number one thing is that every parent is extremely worried about their kid. Of course, when a chaplain shows up, that can exacerbate this worry rather than calm it.
I think people who are religious are more likely to want one around, but it's a very secular position.
The challenge is the same whether or not I'm collaborating: to empathize with your reader and to tell a story that will matter to him or her. But the mechanics of going about that challenge change when you're collaborating, because you have someone to help refine your thinking and expand your vision of what might happen.
I'm not from Indianapolis, but I like living in Indianapolis. If I were to explain it, I'd tell someone to imagine a city that perfectly captures the best and the worst of America. Imagine the truly American city, because that's what it is.
The ideas of directing attention outward, trying to imagine other people complexly, trying not to see myself as the center of the universe - these concepts have become important to me, and I hope they're at work in my life on a minute-by-minute basis.
I don't see a future where we're all taught by robots. The real life, physical experience of being in a classroom and having conversations with knowledgeable people is immeasurably valuable and irreplaceable.
The internet is necessarily public. It can be filtered-public or censored-public, but it necessarily has to be open and available.
Don't lie to anyone, but particularly don't lie to millennials. They just know. They can smell it. Be yourself: if you're old, be old. If you don't know anything about pop culture, don't pretend to know anything about pop culture. When you credit teenagers with intelligence and emotional sophistication, they respond intelligently and with emotional sophistication.
It's bad for your brain not to unplug.
One of the things I like about making stuff in the age of the Internet, is that people make stuff in response to it. You can see people respond to your work visually or musically or with writing.
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