Growing up, I took so many cues from books. They taught me most of what I knew about what people did, about how to behave. They were my teachers and my advisers.

My very small part in WATCHMEN is that, every now and then, Alan would phone me: ''Neil, you're an educated man. Where does it say...'' He would need a quote from the Bible, or an essay about owls. I was his occasional research assistant.

I think I’ll dismember the world and then I’ll dance in the wreckage.

It's a given that we exist in a world where we have to live in continuity every day; no one is immune to that, in life or romance novels. By the same token, it's not something I find terribly important.

Even dreams, the most delicate and intangible of things, can prove remarkable difficult to kill.

Because, if one is writing novels today, concentrating on the beauty of the prose is right up there with concentrating on your semi-colons, for wasted effort.

Life and death are different sides of the same coin.