I think we're programmed for hardship. In my experience, human beings are happiest when they're working themselves to the bone. People are more likely to feel adrift and unsatisfied when they have too much leisure time. Obstacles are good.

For me, writing post-apocalyptic novels isn't so much about exploding helicopters and fifty-megaton doomsday bombs as it is about the pleasure of dealing with the best of everything that makes us human: cleverness, grit, loyalty, and self-sacrifice.

For hundreds of thousands of years, life was brutal. It still is for a good chunk of the planet. The technology and wealth we enjoy in North America is a very new development in history, and I think we miss the challenges of day-to-day survival in our comparatively easy modern lives. Some people will even create problems if they have none.

If the mind is not healthy, you'll never get a sound body.

Whoever it was who said that to philosophize is an exercise in dying was right in more ways than one, for by writing a book, nobody gets younger.

Metro police can't infuse hope into those for whom hope is foreign. The algorithm does not exist that can heal the traumatized. Data-driven predictions won't result in the delivery of mental health services.

You hear the word 'cancer,' and you think it is a death sentence. In fact, the shock is the biggest thing about a diagnosis of cancer.