It's wonderful to play around with fantasy, because there are an amazing number of as-yet-unbroken rules out there.

It's a terrible thing for a book, when you feel like you're supposed to like it.

Nothing is wrong with you. You're not different. Everybody feels as bad as you do: this is just what writing a novel feels like. To write a novel is to come in contact with raw, primal feelings, hopes and longings and psychic wounds, and try to make a big public word-sculpture out of them, and that is a crazy hard thing to do.

Some of the comments on YouTube make you weep for the future of humanity just for the spelling alone, never mind the obscenity and the naked hatred.

And I'm not as young as I once was. At my age, I don't have time to be bored.

It's very important, at least to me as a writer, that there be some rules on the table when I'm writing. Rules come from genres. You're writing in a genre, there are rules, which is great because then you can break the rules. That's when really exciting things happen.

I studied the cello for a long time, from when I was little up through college.