We may not always agree with every one of our neighbors. That's life. And it's part of living in such a diverse and dense city. But we also recognize that part of being a New Yorker is living with your neighbors in mutual respect and tolerance. It was exactly that spirit of openness and acceptance that was attacked on 9/11 2001.

It is only when you watch the dense mass of thousands of ants crowded together around the Hill blackening the ground that you begin to see the whole beast and now you observe it thinking planning calculating. It is an intelligence a kind of live computer with crawling bits for its wits.

Just as we accumulate memories of facts by integrating them into a network we accumulate life experiences by integrating them into a web of other chronological memories. The denser the web the denser the experience of time.

Literature transmits incontrovertible condensed experience... from generation to generation. In this way literature becomes the living memory of a nation.

I have this desire to just while away weeks months and years. It took me two years to make this record but that was with me trying to condense my process and not disappear down the rabbit hole with all the cool things I've collected. I could take 10 years and not explore everything I want to with these instruments.

I was born left-handed but I was made to use my other hand. When I was writing 'Famished Road ' which was very long I got repetitive stress syndrome. My right wrist collapsed so I started using my left hand. The prose I wrote with my left hand came out denser so later on I had to change it.

With 'Twilight ' you have these massive tomes that you have to condense. With 'Penoza ' we had an eight episode Dutch series that just for the pilot alone I condensed three episodes. So there's a lot of filling in and a ton of invention that has to happen to fill out eight episodes.

We were alone. Where I could not say hardly imagine. All was black and such a dense black that after some minutes my eyes had not been able to discern even the faintest glimmer.