Being a writer can be isolating. It's good to be among readers and booksellers.

We have reached the point where ignorance and neglect are the best we can hope for in a ruler.

A big silvery janitor. Penny, this can’t be how the universe works.” “In the Order we call it ‘inverse profundity.’ We’ve observed it in any number of cases. The deeper you go into the cosmic mysteries, the less interesting everything gets.

My ultimate goal is to drive people back to the books, when I think of an adaptation.

Every year the literary press praises dozens if not hundreds of novels to the skies, asserting explicitly or implicitly that these books will probably not be suffering water damage in the basements of their authors' houses 20 years from now. But historically, anyway, that's not the way the novelistic ecology works.

Supposedly I've got traces of an English accent, though I can't hear it. I must have inherited it from my mother, who's English, and then I think it was exacerbated by the fact that I live with an Australian.

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.