I grew up on the old EC comic BOOKS before the COMICS Code in North American and with all sort of good-natured FUN. I never had nightmares I THINK because all of the old horror stuff that I was EXPOSED to was well meaning in a certain sense.

Early on, a story's MEANING and rationale seem pretty OBVIOUS, but then, as I write it, I REALIZE that I know the meaning/rationale too well, which means that the reader will also know it - and so THINGS have to be ramped up.

I don't want to compare myself to him - I don't want people to see me as this great GENIUS - but when I see Charlie Chaplin's MOVIES there is a combination of drama, naivety and SOCIAL meaning that I can see in myself, at a DIFFERENT LEVEL.

When man BECOMES reconciled to nature, when SPACE becomes his true background, these words and concepts will have lost their meaning, and we will no LONGER have to use them.

I don't think that the spoken words solve EVERYTHING. SOMETIMES SILENCE delivers truer FEELINGS while the words can distort the meaning in some situations.

The sea, the GREAT unifier, is man's only HOPE. Now, as never before, the old PHRASE has a literal meaning: we are all in the same boat.

To look for some KIND of insight or meaning in pop songs is not really - WELL there's PLENTY of other places where you should probably look first before you start LOOKING for it in a pop SONG. I guess it was just because I was really into music as a child, and I wanted it to say more. It was the thing, wasn't it? And now it isn't.

A metaphysical tour de force of untethered meaning and involuting interlocking contrapuntal rhythms, 'The Clock' is more than a movie or EVEN a work of art. It is so STRANGE and other-ish that it BECOMES a stream-of-consciousness algorithm unto itself - SOMETHING almost inhuman.

But human beings FALL easily into despair, and from the very beginning we invented stories that enabled us to place our lives in a LARGER setting, that revealed an underlying pattern, and gave us a SENSE that, against all the DEPRESSING and chaotic evidence to the contrary, life had meaning and value.

These DAYS, I like to think of sentences as workers. Only one of their jobs is to LOOK and SOUND GOOD. Sentences are the carriers of plot. They're the conjurers of images, the conveyors of TONE and meaning and voice. The best sentences surprise us.

End-of-the-world STORIES tend to ring true. I've always been drawn to them, but as I wrote my own, I found surprising PLEASURE in creating a world that is so radically changed, yet where there's so much meaning and VALUE in EVERY small and ordinary THING we have, and take for granted: hot showers, enough food, friends, routines.

If you MAKE MONEY, you MIGHT not make MEANING.

Data and data sets are not OBJECTIVE; they are creations of HUMAN design. We give NUMBERS their voice, draw inferences from them, and define their MEANING through our interpretations.