I won't walk under scaffolding or under ladders. I wear things like a baseball player wears things that are supposed to have luck. I am superstitious about everything.

As a person, I do ascribe to a lot of magical thinking myself.

I see ghosts everywhere, and that is partially a function of my being incredibly near-sighted and reading way too late into the night.

Everything is cyclical. Historical eras go through times of intense cynicism, broken by periods of intense idealism.

Our human impulse is to control everything, but fiction seems to me to be about allowing an element of mystery into the text.

It seems to me that if you were to take almost any half-century in history, you'd find a grand societal tug-of-war between the community and the individual.

I've always relied on producing more material than I need. With each of my published novels I've written around four times the amount of material that's ended up in the book.