I was a scholarship minor public school day boy at Ardingly College and later Whitgift School. Then, straight into work as a journalist - a wonderful thing for a writer.

You got to understand the god thing. It’s not magic. It’s about being you, but the you that people believe in. It’s about being the concentrated, magnified, essence of you. It’s about becoming thunder, or the power of a running horse, or wisdom. You take all the belief and become bigger, cooler, more than human. You crystallize.” He paused. “And then one day they forget about you, and they don’t believe in you, and they don’t sacrifice, and they don’t care, and the next thing you know you’re running a three-card monte game on the corner of Broadway and Forty-third.

Agnes was the worst prophet that's ever existed. Because she was always right. That's why the book never sold.

Sister Mary chose that moment to come in with the tea. Satanist or not, she'd also found a plate and arranged some iced biscuits on it.

Stories are in one way or another mirrors. We use them to explain to ourselves how the world works or how it doesn’t work. Like mirrors stories prepare us for the day to come. They distract us from the things in darkness.

A disturbing novel about dreams and wishes, a nightmarish distaff monkey's paw of a book that it's impossible to forget. Lisa Tuttle remains our preeminent chronicler of family madness and desire.

With American Gods I was trying very, very consciously - there was a level at which it was a little like trying to write a novel in French - you know, "this novel is to be written in American."