Tools, of course, can be the subtlest of traps.

Love isn't quite desire... Love is probably a little bit in The Sandman's domain. Love is partly a dream, it's partly to do with desire, and sometimes it's partly to do with death, as well. It's also very often something to do with delirium.

When I was very young, I would occasionally stick 'f****' where I knew something contentious might happen so that the editor could remove the word 'f***' very proudly and leave whatever else was around it.

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.

It's like one of those dreams that changes you. You keep some of the dream forever, and you know things down deep inside yourself, because it happened to you, but when you go looking for details they kind of just slip out of your head.

Books are special, books are the way we talk to generations that have not turned up yet. The fact that we can actually, essentially communicate with the people in ancient Egypt, people in Rome and Greece, people in ancient Britain, people in New York in the 1920s who can communicate to us and change the way we think, and change the things that we believe. I think that books are special. Books are sacred. And I think that when you are selling books, you have to remember that in all the profits and loss, in all of that, you are treading on sacred ground.

One thing that I get from a lot of people with American Gods is people saying that they would love some kind of glossary with a list of all the Gods and who they are, so that they can look them up.