I think that young readers have very strong stomachs.

I don't tend to picture my characters as actors and actresses.

I'm for any woman who loves sloths.

Domestic realism has dominated the American marketplace for decades now. It leeches into literary fiction, and I don't think it's that rich a vein.

No one bought my screenplays.

I wanted to go into the tropics and save animals - and write, of course.

You're lucky if people like your book, and the more people that like it, the luckier I feel.

One man's holy is another woman's sublime.

If you're going to do a thing, do it fully so that no writing you give the world misrepresents you - so that nothing you put out there is like a sad regift you couldn't throw away and had to find a place for.

In 1805, the explorers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, making their way across the West, were warned by American Indian tribes of grizzly bears' awesome strength.

I never seem to leave L.A., though I left L.A.

L.A., for me, is a perfect microcosm of America - because it's so profligate, and so glamorous, and so anti-intellectual, finally.

Most of my books have something to do with L.A.

I've always wondered: is there really any access to the White House?

I don't write the same book twice.

As soon as a regular guy like Bill Clinton becomes the president, he wears a mantle of greatness. He's the president.

I like to amuse myself.

There has to be space for play in literature. We all need some breathing room.

It's a friendly act to write a lighthearted book.

Marriage is like the romantic ideal, and yet the trappings around it and the culture about it are really the opposite of that.

There is a lot of contradictions of mermaids as a symbol. I'm always interested in contradictions.

The Free Body Culture gave me a gift I might never have received had I refused to play along. It left me with an acute sense of the absurd - one I still cherish - to be there among my fellow apes, awkward and less than half-willing, aiming and missing, leaping, landing and wincing.

I came to understand that a German nudist, in 1984, loved little more than to work on his or her tan.

I used to try to write around the edges, but now I try to walk a more direct line.

I love irony.

I think the best fiction is a form of psychological suspense, even though I don't really write in that idiom.

Do we seek delicate phraseology in politics or other forms of public life? We do not.

We paint a slow picture. You can see the brushstrokes. We don't get to the point, and sometimes when we do, our readers don't notice, in fact. It's so couched in nuance, it can fly right over a person's head. 'What was that you said? I couldn't quite make it out.'

At writing workshops, they taught us to show, not tell - well, showing takes time.

In Hiroshima, bombed Aug. 6, 1945, no warning was given of the air attack, and thus no escape was possible for the mostly women, children and old people who fell victim.

In Nagasaki, American planes did drop warning leaflets - but not till Aug. 10, a day after the city was bombed.

The summer after I got divorced, my children asked to sleep in my bed again. It would be the first time we'd shared a bed since they were infants.

I have a king bed, one of those memory-foam mattresses that doesn't jiggle as you get in or out. Even if you cleaved it down the middle with a pickax, the thing wouldn't tremble. It's practically earthquake-proof.

I can be pretty dense about my own basic needs, when my focus is getting through the many small tasks of a day's work and a day's caretaking.

Oil drilling and coal mining are killing endangered wildlife, polluting rivers, creating smog over wilderness areas and blocking wildlife corridors in America's most treasured landscapes.

When it comes to American Indians, mainstream America suffers from willful blindness.

Indeed, the hype around 'Watchmen' is its curse. If you want to enjoy the comic for what it is, ignore the attributions of literariness and the novelistic pretensions with which some critics have imbued it. This isn't high culture, and it doesn't pretend to be. It's good, juicy pulp fiction with a little nuclear apocalypse thrown in.

Within the macho-melodrama tropes of the superhero genre, it's fair to say 'Watchmen' stands out for its rich entertainment, its darkness, and its lurid pleasures. Its vividly drawn panels, moody colors and lush imagery make its popularity well-deserved, if disproportionate.

The male domination and chauvinism of the comics form is either being wittily lampooned in 'Watchmen' or handily perpetuated, depending on whom you ask.

If the dinosaurs are any indication, there's a place in our pantheon for the extinct. My son has a blue plushy allosaurus he calls Spot-Spot, with whom he often sleeps.

In October 2014, for the first time in almost three-quarters of a century, a gray wolf was seen loping along the forested North Rim of the Grand Canyon, in Arizona. She had walked hundreds of miles, probably from Wyoming or Idaho.

In December 2011, a wild gray wolf set foot in California, the first sighting in almost a century. He'd wandered in from Oregon, looking for a mate.