God, in the orthodox view, causes famine, plague, and flood. Was God evil? Evil is a convenient fiction.

To do magic, to do great magic, he has to know himself as a piece of the universe.A piece of the universe?A little piece that has all the rest of it in it. Everything outside of him is also inside of him.

When, in the third book, we do learn the identity of the Blue Rose murderer, the information comes in a muted, nearly off-hand manner, and the man has died long before.

Ideally, I would create a book so interdependent and self-sustaining in its parts, so wondrously connected word by word and paragraph by paragraph, so charged with the joy of language, that it would actually float three or four inches above any table where you try to set it down.

My first real breakthrough collided with the last months of Callaghan's Labour government, which had every intention of enjoying my success as much as I did.

In violence there is often the quality of yearning - the yearning for completion. For closure. For that which is absent and would if present bring to fulfillment. For the body without which the wing is a useless frozen ornament. ("A Short Guide To The City")

Each new book is a tremendous challenge.