When you're starting off as a young writer, you look at all the stuff that's gone before and the stuff that's influenced you, and you reach the ladle of your imagination into this bubbling stew pot of all of this stuff, and you pour it out. And that's where you start from.

Rain in the graveyard, and the world puddled into blurred reflections.

Recounting the strange is like telling one's dreams: one can communicate the events of a dream, but not the emotional content, the way that a dream can colour one's entire day.

People kill what they fear. They burned, and drowned, and hanged those they saw as witches, the devil's servants: the wise women and the cunning men, the unfortunate, the lost and the strange

I've been making a list of the things they don't teach you at school. They don't teach you how to love somebody. They don't teach you how to be famous. They don't teach you how to be rich or how to be poor. They don't teach you how to walk away from someone you don't love any longer. They don't teach you how to know what's going on in someone else's mind. They don't teach you what to say to someone who's dying. They don't teach you anything worth knowing.

I imagine the world dividing into the people who want to feed their children, and the ones shooting at them.

The best thing about doing a signing tour is that numbers become faces. I got to sign books for six or seven thousand people, all of whom were dreadfully nice. Everything else, the interviews, the hotels, the plane travel, the best-seller lists, even the sushi, gets old awfully fast. Well, maybe not the sushi.