One either loves, or waits for love, or banishes love for good. That is the full range of possible choices.

The fact of being alive compensated for what life did to one.

I don't like books that play to the gallery, but I've become more concerned with telling a story as clearly and engagingly as I can.

Religion is responsible for a lot of the problems in the history of the world and it's not something that I practice or recommend, but to each his own.

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.

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 think, in a written novel, the way in which you play with the readers' emotion or the way in which you engage the readers' emotions can be very indirect. You could come at it through irony or comedy, etcetera, and you could capture people's sympathies and feelings kind of by stealth if you like.