I love learning. I tend to stop doing things once I get good at them, and to try something else I'm not as good at, leaving a bunch of fans going, "But he was really good at that. Why isn't he still doing it?"

And weren't, when you got right down to it, particularly evil. Human beings mostly aren't. They just get carried away by new ideas, like dressing up in jackboots and shooting people, or dressing up in white sheets and lynching people, or dressing up in tie-dye jeans and and playing guitar at people. Offer people a new creed with a costume and their hearts and minds will follow.

It's not a bad thing for a writer not to feel at home. Writers - we're much more comfortable at parties standing in the corner watching everybody else having a good time than we are mingling.

I was not happy as a child, although from time to time I was content. I lived in books more than I lived anywhere else.

I always say that if you're a novelist, the challenge is not writing what you think ought to happen, but trying in some way to write what did happen in a world that doesn't necessarily exist.

It's only a world, after all, and they're just sand grains in the desert, worlds.

I still love the book-ness of books, the smell of books: I am a book fetishist—books to me are the coolest and sexiest and most wonderful things there are.