The main advantage of being a reviewer is that you read a lot. A lot of books get sent to you, and you have an amazing vantage point from which to observe what's going on in contemporary fiction - not only genre stuff, the whole spectrum.

It's a great thing when you feel that you recognize yourself, deeply and movingly, in a work of literature.

You're all so obsessed with other worlds, you're so convinced that this one is crap and everywhere else is great, but you've never bothered to figure out what's going on here!

Magic: it was what happened when the mind met the world, and the mind won for a change.

Though the funny thing about never being asked for anything is that after a while you start to feel like maybe you don’t have anything worth giving.

I've stayed in houses that were in the country, and in England, but I'm still not sure that I've stayed in an English country house.

The new Web is a very different thing. It's a tool for bringing together the small contributions of millions of people and making them matter. Silicon Valley consultants call it Web 2.0, as if it were a new version of some old software. But it's really a revolution.