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

In the deepest places, where physical norms collapse under the crushing water, bodies still fall softly through the dark, days after their vessels have capsized. They decay on their long journey down. Nothing will hit the black sand at the bottom of the world but algae-covered bones.

Books are always obviously having conversations with other books, and some times they're amiable and sometimes not.

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.

It felt like being a child again, though it was not. Being a child is like nothing. It's only being. Later, when we think about it, we make it into youth.

Anything for gold and experience.

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