With the novels, I usually start from something in my own life that I can't resolve, so I turn it into a metaphor and for months or sometimes years I'll exhaust all of my emotional reaction to this issue by making it enormous on the page.

There will always be an underground.

Where we're standing right now, in the ruins in the dark, what we build could be anything.

I've been choking to death for years. By now this should be easy.

Stone crumbles. Wood rots. People, well they die. But things as fragile as a thought, a dream, a legend, they can go on and on.

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.

People fall so in love with their pain, they can’t leave it behind. The same as the stories they tell. We trap ourselves.