When I'm writing a book, generally I start with the mood and setting, along with a couple of specific images—things that have come into my head, totally abstracted from any narrative, that I've fixated on. After that, I construct a world, or an area, into which that general setting, that atmosphere, and the specific images I've focused on can fit.

One of the things that I love so much about fantasy and science fiction is that the weirdness that it creates is always at its best completely its own end and also metaphorically and symbolically laden.

I think there's something quite interesting about the almost tragic quality of a lot of overwrought prose, because it has a much more self-conscious awareness of its own failure to touch the real.

To take the choice of another ... to forget their concrete reality, to abstract them, to forget that you are a node in a matrix, that actions have consequences. We must not take the choice of another being. What is community but a means to ... for all we individuals to have ... our choices.

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

Any moment called NOW is always full of possibles.

The Weaver is a really godlike power. It's not even a blind idiot god, a sort of Lovecraft thing, it's just a purely capricious god. It's an intelligence you can't understand, so you can't trust it." -Amazon.com interview