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I really love being alive. I love my family and my work. I love the opportunity I have to do things. That's what happiness is.

It's exhilarating to be alive in a time of awakening consciousness; it can also be confusing, disorienting, and painful.

I like living. I have sometimes been wildly, despairingly, acutely miserable, racked with sorrow, but through it all I still know quite certainly that just to be alive is a grand thing.

I was in and out of comas until I was nine and I would lose entire days and weeks. The novelty of being able to really do stuff hasn't worn off - I still feel like I'm making up for lost time.

There is no scientific explanation for the fact that while my body lay in coma, my mind - my conscious, inner self - was alive and well.

Sleep is lovely, death is better still, not to have been born is of course the miracle.

Death is present every day in our lives. It's not that I take pleasure in the morbid fascination of it, but it is a fact of life.

I am so happy to be alive. That's the one thing I'd like for people to know. Sometimes people walk by and slip up and say the wrong thing about me, and I'll smile. They wonder why am I smiling. Because I'm happy that I'm alive.

What I try to capture as a writer is the feeling of being alive, of being awake.

Life is beautiful, what do you think? In the morning I say, 'Ah, I am alive still!' All my friends die already. I am alive. It is fantastic.