Remember, when you don’t know what to do, it never hurts to play Scrabble. It’s like reading the I Ching or tea leaves.

A vampire is a flexible metaphor. You know, death, sex, change, stagnation, loss of self, loss of agency, having to keep one's real self secret, the possibility of something lasting forever: love, hate, grief.

I built a cannon out of ice, and wrapped myself in the funeral carpet which my husbands and wives had woven for me out of their own hair, and one of my wives was my gunner. I came back here, after many adventures, and once, when I'd been drinking, donated the funeral carpet to the national museum. When I was sober again, I asked for it back, but they claimed not to know what I was talking about.

The beloved may be treacherous, greasy-headed and given to evil habits, or else it can be a man in his late forties who works too much, or it can be an alarm clock.

Whether or not this story has a happy ending depends, of course, on who is reading it. Whether you are a wolf or a girl.

When I'm up for an award, there are usually two or three other things on the ballot that I like better than my own fiction.

The Customer isn't always right. Sometimes the customer is an a**hole. That's the first rule of retail.