I like creating villains.

Don't we all deserve forgiveness? I hope we do; I believe we do. Forgiveness says as much about the character of the person bestowing it as the person receiving it. Learning to forgive may be the most difficult of human acts,and the closest thing to divinity, whatever you decide that is.

Choosing writing as a career, just by itself, is a measure of not being a calculating person.

I'm an ecumenical reader, grew up with all sorts of fiction, teach writing, went to the Iowa Writers' Workshop, so my tastes and interests are broad.

A thousand recollected lives were passing through her, a thousand stories - of love and work, of parents and children, of duty and joy and grief. Beds slept in and meals eaten, and the bliss and pain of the body, and a view of summer leaves from a window on a morning it had rained; the nights of loneliness and the nights of love, the soul in it's body keeping always longing to be known.

And I had always liked vampire stories because they are great material that can be refashioned in lots of ways.

If you are writing any book about the end of the world, what you are really writing about is what's worth saving about it.