For madness must be punished in a world in which mere sanity is prized. The revenge of the ordinary upon the gifted.

Writing allows for fictitious voices - the voices of persons unlike myself - that might otherwise be muted.

I tend to think in dramatic terms. In life, there may be an actual drama, but it would be the fictionalized, imagined drama that engaged me.

Often in gothic novels there's a large house, an estate, and it's symbolic of that culture. Usually it's sort of moldering or rotted or something, and sometimes it's a whole community.

Look at the world and see what's there. It's very beautiful. It's a very exciting but in some ways treacherous world, and all this goes into the writing.

Writing! The activity for which the only adequate bribe is the possibility of suicide, one day.

As soon as I moved to Princeton in 1978, I became fascinated by local history, much of it Revolutionary War-era; and I became fascinated by the presidency of Woodrow Wilson at Princeton University.