I was about 13, in some ways, when I wrote the first book. Approximately 18 when I wrote the second.

I was a late child from my parents, so I grew up surrounded by people a lot older than me. I think even when I was 21, I felt like I was a 70-year-old man.

Certain kinds of things that the novel used to do, which was, "Oh, I'm living out here in West Nowhere, Nebraska and I'm curious how the upper class in New York City lives, I guess I'll read a novel about it." We don't have to do that now. You just turn on the TV. Turn on Lifestyles Of The Rich And Famous. You can get that information anywhere. Novels don't have to do that anymore.

Fiction that isn't an author's personal adventure into the frightening or the unknown isn't worth writing for anything but money.

Readers and writers are united in their need for solitude, in their pursuit of substance in a time of ever-increasing evanescence: in their reach inward, via print, for a way out of loneliness.

I wrote two plotted books, got some of the fundamentals of storytelling down, then... it's sort of like taking the training wheels off, trying to write a book that's fun in the same way without relying on quite such mechanical or external beats.

Life, in her experience, had a kind of velvet luster. You looked at yourself from one perspective and all you saw was weirdness. Move your head a little bit, though, and everything looked reasonably normal.