As a writer I'm more drawn to villains who are just slightly mad.

I read Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, which I think will subsequently be recognized as one of the first great novels of the 21st century.

Magic is wild, dangerous stuff. You never realize how useful limitations are until it's much too late.

Everybody wanted to be the hero of their own story. Nobody wanted to be comic relief.

It was strange to be naked in front of anybody. It was like that cold water out there in the bay: scary, you didn’t think you could stand it, but then you plunged in and pretty soon you got used to it. There was enough hiding in life. Sometimes you just wanted to show somebody your tits.

I'm now much more excited about genre distinctions. What I still see breaking down are more the hierarchical arrangements of genres. That is, "There is literary fiction, and then there are lesser genres." I'm much more clear on the idea that literary fiction is itself a genre. It is not above other genres. It is down there in the muck with all the other genres, and it's doing the wonderful things that it does, but to give it a Y-axis, to make it high and low, just seems absurd. I stand by that.

His whole personality was like an elaborate joke that he never stopped telling.