I was a huge fantasy geek growing up. I was the dungeon master in my D&D game.

The longer you work in this business [movie], the more you start to be able to see the carpentry. You can see where things are going, and it's harder to surprise you, as a reader

With the movies, people are not going to wait around. The deadline is a deadline. In publishing it's more a polite suggestion.

Fiction novels, that's my game.

I never understood people who said their greatest fear was public speaking, or spiders, or any of the other minor terrors. How could you fear anything more than death? Everything else offered moments of escape: a paralyzed man could still read Dickens; a man in the grips of dementia might have flashes of the must absurd beauty.

I've always envied people who sleep easily. Their brains must be cleaner, the floorboards of the skull well swept, all the little monsters closed up in a steamer trunk at the foot of the bed.

A certain luxury when you get to writing a novel is to have the space to have your characters just banter.