The world is full of ghosts, and some of them are still people.

I believe I encountered death, which was a bit too much for a seven-year-old.

The actual Blue Rose murders, which lie at the core of the three novels, yield various incorrect solutions which assume the status of truth.

Many fiction writers eventually want to feel that their work forms a single, unified entity.

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.

I write longer sentences than most of the others, maybe because I probably like Henry James more than they do.

Each new book is a tremendous challenge.