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

It's different being afraid when there's the hope it will amount to something.

Here she was, a women who could bolt-load a crossbow in under a second, put half a dozen long arrows in the air in fewer than five, blade a target dead through the sweet spot at six meters, on the run, on an off day; and yet knitting a pair of baby booties seemed completely beyond her power.

I came to Houston for a job, the reason most people move halfway across the country with a first grader and a five-week-old. I came here to teach at Rice.

My rule has always been, write the next part of the book that you seem to know well. So I won't necessarily write chapter two after chapter one.

It was possible, he understood, for a person's life to become just a long series of mistakes, and that the end, when it came, was just one more mistake in a chain of bad choices. The thing was, most of these mistakes were actually borrowed from other people. You took their bad ideas, and for whatever reason, made them your own.

This ravishing world. This achingly bittersweet, ravishing world.