Alternate history fascinates me, as it fascinates all novelists, because 'What if?' is the big thing.

You can step in the same river but the water will always be new.

Ethics are not necessarily to do with being law-abiding. I am very interested in the moral path, doing the right thing.

Why do cats sleep so much? Perhaps they've been trusted with some major cosmic task, an essential law of physics - such as: if there are less than five million cats sleeping at any one time the world will stop spinning.

When you chopped logs with the ax and they split open they smelled beautiful, like Christmas. But when you split someone's head open it smelled like abattoir and quite overpowered the scent of the wild lilacs you'd cut and brought into the house only this morning, which was already another life.

Certainly I had a really terrible time with 'Emotionally Weird.' When I finished it, I thought, 'I can't write any more.

(although anyone with half a brain must surely be mired in existential gloom all the time)