I like to give people novels I think they would like, on no particular occasion - just when we're in a bookstore together. I like to receive reference books on my birthday.

People aren't either wicked or noble. They're like chef's salads, with good things and bad things chopped and mixed together in a vinaigrette of confusion and conflict.

I think pirates, like astronauts, particularly for a boy, are always kind of worth thinking about.

I'm not very good at the accordion. If I played guitar, I wouldn't be on anyone's album. But because I play the accordion and no one else does, I end up doing strange things.

Opera was an enormous part of my childhood. My parents were both opera buffs, and they met in the box seat of an opera performance. And I also was a boy soprano, so before puberty hit, I was onstage playing a wide variety of orphans and urchins in all sorts of operas, and the sheer melodrama of their stories was just always appealing to me.

If you enjoy books with happy endings than you are better off reading some other book.

There are two kinds of fears: rational and irrational- or in simpler terms, fears that make sense and fears that don't.