So long as it fated, fate didn't care what it fated.

There are only so many ways to experience pain. There are an almost limitless number of ways to inflict it, but the pain itself, initially vividly distinct in all its specifications, becomes, inevitably, just pain.

I like the idea of trying to write a book in every genre.

Word spread because word will spread. Stories and secrets fight, stories win, shed new secrets, which new stories fight, and on.

My job is not to try to give readers what they want but to try to make readers want what I give.

In every book I write, I try to name-check the most prominent influences, or the most prominent conscious influences.

We speak now or I do, and others do. You've never spoken before. You will. You'll be able to say how the city is a pit and a hill and a standard and an animal that hunts and a vessel on the sea and the sea and how we are fish in it, not like the man who swims weekly with fish but the fish with which he swims, the water, the pool. I love you, you light me, warm me, you are suns. You have never spoken before.