I don't view Twitter as a promotional tool but as a really, really, really cool cocktail party.

I think James Bond is a spy. He's not superhuman. Calling him a superhero is like calling James Bond movies "comic-book movies."

What really matters is not how well a character fits a definition, but how strongly he or she resonates. Characters with strong, resonant ideas at their core will have more of an impact on the cultural consciousness than a character who's just an empty collection of attributes.

When you have a novel set in a fictional history, you still should get your history right.

If there's ever a character who can only serve one metaphor, I'll probably tell one story with that character and be done with it.

I wanted to be a writer, but the idea of writing novels or movies seemed really intimidating. I never got more than a few pages into one.

I'm not building each one character around one metaphor, so much as trying to build a heroic archetype that can be used to express the kind of metaphors that I find in each story.