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

Scars are not injuries, Tanner Sack. A scar is a healing. After injury, a scar is what makes you whole.

I don't like allegory.

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.

My Google-fu is strong.

Loads of children read books about dinosaurs, underwater monsters, dragons, witches, aliens, and robots. Essentially, the people who read SF, fantasy and horror haven't grown out of enjoying the strange and weird.

The dead are way more organized than the living.