Too much mystery is merely an annoyance. Too much adventure is exhausting. And a little terror goes a long way.

If I waited until I felt creative, I would never have had a career. I long ago learned that a day that starts out badly, when nothing comes out on the page or comes out wrong, can suddenly turn into a good day a few hours later, when suddenly everything starts to click. The brain can be cajoled into being creative.

There are days when it seems to me that in literature the most convincing depiction of the world in which we live is to be found in the phantasmagorical kingdom through which Lewis Carroll took Alice on a tour.

I'm alive but I have no life. I'm alive but also dead. I'm dead and alive.

If I had to write a rough draft, all the way through and then go back and start over, I probably would just stop writing. I wouldn't find that interesting. I would feel that I had committed so many things to the paper that I couldn't easily undo because one thing leads to the next, the interconnectedness, the sequences would make it very hard to change something that simply didn't work.

Only once in a generation does anything as fresh as a vomiting detective come along.

I've a long list of things I don't know how I've done, but I've done them. In the end, it's always about perseverance.