I think almost every writer in the world would hope that books would be always talked about with respect and civility and depth and seriousness.

The key thing is managed awareness of your role in the world and history. Think too much and you know you are nothing. Think just enough and you know you are small, but important to some. That's the best you can do.

But I'm thinking about 12 things at once, a hundred thousand times a day. Most people do, I would imagine.

When I was on the bestseller list with the first book, everyone who knows me knows that every week it continued to be on the list was a very dark week for me. Everyone knows that all I wanted was to be off that list.

To me any given story has its appropriate form. There might be some story I get involved with that's begging to be a graphic novel, so that will have to be that way.

Having lost people when they were young, you feel intimately acquainted with mortality, I guess. Though I procrastinate worse than anybody.

My head was a condemned church with a ceiling of bats, but I swung from this dark mood to euphoria when I thought about leaving.