I'm just going to stay here, in the darkness under the arch. I can hear you all out there, trip-trapping, trip-trapping over my bridge. Oh yes, I can hear you. But I'm not coming out.

Like some kind of particularly tenacious vampire the short story refuses to die, and seems at this point in time to be a wonderful length for our generation.

I would not describe myself as a political writer except in the sense that the personal is political, which is something that I do strongly believe. And in that sense American Gods is a very personal novel and a political novel. I was trying to describe the experience of coming to America as an immigrant, the experience of watching the way that America tends to eat other cultures.

Children's fiction is the most important fiction of all.

It’s not that they’re small, the fair folk. Especially not the queen of them all, Mab of the flashing eyes and the slow smile with lips that can conjure your heart under the hills for a hundred years. It’s not that they’re small. It’s that we’re so far away.

Bod shrugged. "So?" he said. "It's only death. I mean, all of my best friends are dead.

It's always too late for sorries, but I appreciate the sentiment.