I'd love to write some porn, but I don't know if I have the right engines. When I was a young man and I was tempted to write porn, imaginary parents would appear over my shoulder and read what I was writing; just about the point that I managed to banish the imaginary parents, real children would lean over my shoulder and read what I was writing.

On the whole, stories don't write themselves.

Until that moment she had never thought she could do it. Never thought she would be brave enough or scared enough, or desperate enough to dare.

I came to the conclusion that in comedy, everybody gets what they need, whereas in horror, everybody gets what they deserve. I decided that at the end of the day, I was going to give everybody what they needed.

It begins, as most things begin, with a song.

Real life doesn't have to be convincing, but fiction does.

I kept starting 'Anansi Boys' as a movie and stopping, and eventually wrote the novel and was happy.