And I grew up on a steady diet of science fiction, especially apocalyptic and postapocalyptic fiction.
So, whenever I'm writing, I'm writing in the presence of all the other books I've read and I think we all are.
I'm an ecumenical reader, grew up with all sorts of fiction, teach writing, went to the Iowa Writers' Workshop, so my tastes and interests are broad.
I think many years ago I got on a bus in L.A. and drove around to see the stars' homes, but that's the extent of my direct experience in Hollywood.
And indeed, I am a warmhearted and thoroughly domestic man who gets up and makes pancakes for his children and kisses them on the head when he sends them off to their day.
My inventing time is all done under the influence of aerobic exercise. Basically, I do all my thinking while I run.
If you are writing any book about the end of the world, what you are really writing about is what's worth saving about it.
My rule has always been, write the next part of the book that you seem to know well. So I won't necessarily write chapter two after chapter one.
I have any number of completely dark obsessions and fascinations, and none of this was present in my profile or my growing profile as a writer.
One of the great themes in American literature is the individual's confrontation with the vast open spaces of the continent.
I came to Houston for a job, the reason most people move halfway across the country with a first grader and a five-week-old. I came here to teach at Rice.
If you write a good action sequence well in a novel, you're already writing it for film, because the only way to do it well is to use some of the same tricks. They're rhetorical, not visual, but it's the same move.
When you write, you take the ball and you hold it up to the light and you turn it slowly, and let people draw their own conclusions. And try to bring empathy to all sides of the equation.
That literary-popular distinction is, in my view, vastly overstated. At the far poles there are clearly books that are purely commercial and purely literary, written for audiences that want to see the same thing enacted over and over and over again. But the middle is where most people read and most people write.