Why are we talking about this good and evil? They're just names for sides. We know that.

Writing, and especially writing a novel, where you get to sit in a room by yourself with either a pen and a paper or a computer for a couple of years, is a very solitary occupation. You can read sales figures - a hundred thousand books sold, half a million books sold - but they are just numbers.

He was having more fun than a barrelful of monkeys.* *Several years earlier Spider had actually been tremendously disappointed by a barrelful of monkeys. It had done nothing he had considered particularly entertaining, apart from emit interesting noises, and eventually, once the noises had stopped and the monkeys were no longer doing anything at all—except possibly on an organic level—had needed to be disposed of in the dead of night.

Names come and names go.

America was, to them, the place that good people went to when they died. They were prepared to believe just about anything could happen in America.

There is something about riding a unicorn, for those people who still can, which is unlike any other experience: exhilarating, and intoxicating, and fine.

If writing a novel is a year's exile to a foreign country, writing a short story is a weekend spent somewhere exotic. They're much more like vacations, more exciting and different, and you're off.