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

Writers who pretend that everything they're doing is completely new are full of it.

When you write, you take the ball and you hold it up to the light and you turn it slowly, and let people draw their own conclusions. And try to bring empathy to all sides of the equation.

I was a 'Planet of the Apes'-obsessed kid.

Every book has got its challenges. You run into a plot point that you can't figure out, or a scene that you struggle to write and have to write 50 times.

A baby was a fact. It was a being with a mind and a nature, and you could feel about it any way you liked, but a baby wouldn't care. Just by existing, it demanded that you believe in a future: the future it would crawl in, walk in, live in. A baby was a piece of time; it was a promise you made that the world made back to you.

And I grew up on a steady diet of science fiction, especially apocalyptic and postapocalyptic fiction.