I used to write in a local coffee shop, but there was another guy, another writer, who kept sitting in my favorite seat. I would show up, and he would be there, and I would get exiled to a couch or something, and it would throw me off my game.

Becoming an author changes your attitude too. Once you see where books come from, and how they're made, they never seem quite as sacred again.

You're saying the gods don't have free will." "The power to make mistakes," Penny said. "Only we have that. Mortals

Oddly, the meanings of books are defined for me much more by their beginnings and middles than they are by their endings.

I've only read three books by Stephen King. When I was 10 I read 'The Long Walk,' one of his pseudonymous Bachman books. In my early 20s, while trapped on a family vacation, I read 'The Dark Half,' which taught me a word I have never forgotten: psychopomp. Now I have read '11/22/63.'

Most people are blind to magic. They move thru a blank and empty world. They’re bored with their lives and there’s nothing they can do about it. They’re eaten alive by longing and they’re dead before they die.

I love playing with the conventions of fantasy, and breaking rules, and crossing lines.