Everyone has a bizarre childhood and unusual life experiences, whether they know it or not. There's no such thing as a normal childhood. What's useful in writing weird fiction is learning how to understand and articulate those moments of personal, particular strangeness.

Life is a series of sudden disappearances, leave-takings without the proper goodbyes.

Everyone has a bizarre childhood and unusual life experiences, whether they know it or not. There's no such thing as a normal childhood. What's useful in writing weird fiction is learning how to understand and articulate those moments of personal, particular strangeness.

You have to salvage what you can, even if you're the one who buried it in the first place.

The zombies were like Canadians, in that they looked enough like real people at first, to fool you.

Topiary has always seemed like a good occupation, comparable in some ways to writing short fiction.

I would like to write a novel, or at least try to write one, although my motives are not entirely pure. For one thing, I get asked about writing novels so much that I feel guilty about never having written one. And although I have no strong desire to write a novel, I would hate not to try. That would just be silly. On the other hand, I hate the idea of slogging through something that turns out to be not good.