I think the darker aspect of my fiction-or anybody's fiction-is by its very nature somehow easier to talk about.

When I look back over my novels what I find is that when I think I'm finished with a theme, I'm generally not. And usually themes will recur from novel to novel in odd, new guises.

Ultimately, your theme will find you. You don't have to go looking for it.

I'm not an easy man. I can be an entertaining one, though it's been my experience that most people don't want to be entertained. They want to be comforted.

Have you ever noticed that when people use the expression 'I have to say', what follows usually needn't be said?

One of the nice things about our marriage, at least to my way of thinking, is that my wife and I no longer have to argue every thing through. We each know what the other will say, and so the saying becomes an unnecessary formality. No doubt some marriage counselor would explain to us that our problem is a failure to communicate, but to my way of thinking we've worked long and hard to achieve this silence, Lily's and mine, so fraught with mutual understanding.

Was anything in the world truer than that intuitive leap of the heart?