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I just don't do anything fun anymore. But, that's dying, isn't it? I mean, you die in stages, right? You let things go in pieces.

Dead people never seem to address the obvious - the things you'd think they'd be bursting to talk about, and the things all of us not-yet-dead are madly curious about. Such as: 'Hey, where are you now? What do you do all day? What's it feel like being dead? Can you see me? Even when I'm on the toilet? Would you cut that out?'

There's a story everywhere. Being bored to death someplace is basically a funny proposition. What you have to watch out for is you don't write a boring story about a boring place.

I know it sounds weird, but how bad, how hard can dying be?

No doubt many people have the feeling that to talk about death at all is, in effect, to conjure it up mentally, to bring it closer in such a way that one has to face up to the inevitability of one's own eventual demise. So, to spare ourselves this psychological trauma, we decide just to try to avoid the topic as much as possible.

Why do we take pleasure in gruesome death, neatly packaged as a puzzle to which we may find a satisfactory solution through clues - or if we are not clever enough, have it revealed by the all-powerful tale-teller at the end of the book? It is something to do with being reduced to, and comforted by, playing by the rules.

I don't know how to not have fun. I'm dying and I'm having fun, and I'm going to keep having fun every day I've got left.

I saw why people died and how they died. I saw gunshot wounds and liver failure. It was a good learning experience, so I came regularly on weekends and holidays.

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.

Death is an absolute mystery. We are all vulnerable to it, it's what makes life interesting and suspenseful.