Life is always going to be stranger than fiction, because fiction has to be convincing, and life doesn't.

For some folks death is release, and for others death is an abomination, a terrible thing. But in the end, I'm there for all of them.

Reading is important. Books are important. Librarians are important. (Also, libraries are not child-care facilities, but sometimes feral children raise themselves among the stacks.)

You see, evil always contains the seeds of its own destruction. It is ultimately negative, and therefore encompasses its downfall even at its moments of apparent triumph. No matter how grandiose, how well-planned, how apparently foolproof of an evil plan, the inherent sinfulness will by definition rebound upon its instigators. No matter how apparently successful it may seem upon the way, at the end it will wreck itself. It will founder upon the rocks of iniquity and sink headfirst to vanish without trace into the seas of oblivion.

My theory on genre is that while there are people out there who believe that genre tells people what to read, actually I believe that genre exists as a marketing tool to tell you what to avoid.

When I was young, you know, the first foreign editions that would come in of anything of mine, I'd sit there and look at them as these strange and wonderful artifacts.

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