When I'm writing books, something weird happens; and the result is the books contain a large amount of what you could call 'supernaturalism.' As a writer, I find I need that to explain the world I'm writing about.

You start at the stupid end of the book, and if you're lucky you finish at the smart end.

What grows best in the heat: fantasy; unreason; lust.

There is a point beyond which conciliation looks like capitulation. I do not believe I passed that point, but others have thought otherwise.

As a writer, one of the things we all learned from the movies was a kind of compression that didn't exist before people were used to watching films. For instance, if you wanted to write a flashback in a novel, you once had to really contextualize it a lot, to set it up. Now, readers know exactly what you're doing. Close-ups, too.

I became a writer because I got addicted to story. The first storyteller in my life was my father.

Free speech is the whole thing, the whole ball game. Free speech is life itself.