So if reality is all a spell, and you don't really want what you think you want... If you have no free will. You don't really know what you know. You don't really love who you only think you love. What do you have left to live for?

We are a nation of physical animals who have forgotten how much we enjoy being that. We are cushioned by this kind of make-believe, unreal world and have no idea what we can survive because we are never challenged or tested.

Inside me is the same desperate hope I have watching the ravenous dead and thinking, Oh please, oh please, oh please. The craving inside of me is to be clutched at by some dead girl. To put my ear to her chest and hear nothing. Even getting munched on by zombies beats the idea that I'm only flesh and blood, skin and bone. Demon or angel or evil spirit, I just need something to show itself. Ghoulie or ghosty or long-legged beastie, I just want my hand held.

I don't do much more than organise other people's ideas and insights and thoughts, and sort of harvest them, and inventory them and present them.

I really believe it's the moments we can't talk about that become the rest of our lives. It's the moments we can't process by telling a story that destroy us in the end.

I see so many tattoos of my stuff on people - tattoos of my book covers, tattoos of quotes . . . it's kind of daunting sometimes.

Shotgunning anybody in this room would be the moral equivalent of killing a car, a Barbie doll, a vacuum cleaner. We're all such products.