Say you're an American novelist, published by the largest publishing house in the world. Their goal is to make as much money from you as possible, to have as many people read your book in as many formats as possible. How can you hope to speak intimately to the numbers of people that represent the book sales required?

Each and every novel is a world outside the world - for a reader to visit, for comfort, consolation, escape, or challenge.

I've never been able to shake the idea of family, which is to say I've never been able to shake my family. Being membered - being one limb of an immense grosser body - that's always been a fact to me.

All of business and all of politics is essentially fiction to those who live them. I have more experience with fiction than most senators because I do it all day, so their world didn't seem that foreign to me.

A national security letter cannot be used to authorize eavesdropping or to read the contents of e-mail. But it does permit investigators to trace revealing paths through the private affairs of a modern digital citizen.

Well, clearly Apple is a role model of the American innovation whereby it produced all these products - iPod, iPhone, iPad - that are really now dominating all the technology arena in the world.

The future of technology is not really location-based apps; it is about making location completely unimportant.

I think social media has a lot of negative impact and negative effects. These are fairly extreme and horrifying and really gruesome.