Growing up devouring horror comics and novels, and being inspired to become a writer because of horror novels, movies, and comic books, I always knew I was going to write a horror novel.

What does the perfect elevator look like, the one that will deliver us from the cities we suffer now, these stunted shacks? We don't know because we can't see inside it, it's something we cannot imagine, like the shape of angels' teeth. It's a black box.

I didn't have to do that much research to present a post-apocalyptic New York because I basically grew up in that New York. That old New York is gone, and that's one thing that's undiscoverable now but I explore in my fiction.

I think the world's big enough for all kinds of zombies. You can have yours and I can have mine. I think by going with slow zombies I maybe have been asserting my own kind of zombie snobbery, but I don't begrudge the youngsters their tackling, running, jumping zombies.

Sanctimony and self-regard are as American as smallpox blankets and supersize meals.

A monster is a person who has stopped pretending.

New York City does not hold our former selves against us. Perhaps we can extend the same courtesy.