I really did for a few weeks think, I'm in pain because the world needs me to save it. Which is so ridiculous and egotistical.

Whether I'm writing about plumbers or psychics or psychic plumbers, I want to find a creative space that imprisons me usefully, so I can deviate with purpose.

I've always said that you were too smart to have a profession. Smart people are hopeless in the face of anything actual. They are terrible cooks. They cannot dress themselves. They are children who need guidance and protecting.

I calmed myself by walking into my nearby bookstore and marveling at all the books other people had written. So many people had finished and published novels; it couldn’t be so hard, right?

As a writer, you want to go somewhere else sometimes. You want to vary the terrain that you're exploring.

I tell myself it's a virtue, my failure to sleep in my own house, or at all. I tell myself that I spend more hours than most people aware that I am alive, and that over a lifetime this adds up to more living, more aliveness. I am more alive than the rest of my family. Which is my greatest night fear. Which is why I hunt. I don't ever want to be more alive than they are.

I don't usually read my reviews. I've noticed older reviewers are much more bothered by the plot complications. Younger reviews don't seem to be bothered by the complications at all.