Perhaps teenagers don't interest me as much as children do since I still feel (even at 58) to be a fairly adolescent personality, especially in my enthusiasms, and I find myself an uninteresting fictional character.

Perhaps teenagers don't interest me as much as children do since I still feel (even at 58) to be a fairly adolescent personality, especially in my enthusiasms, and I find myself an uninteresting fictional character.

Every time I start off a book or a story I feel like I'm developing a new style or approach for that individual story alone, and it sometimes feels as if readers are looking for the same style/approach from the same writer over and over again, which hasn't helped me in the publishing biz.

I enjoy entering the viewpoint of characters who are as different from myself as I can get - children, elderly women, animals, a sexy death row murderess - and to imagine how these disparate individuals see the world's cruelty and beauty and vastness.

I can’t think of a more philosophical time in a person’s life than when they are children. It’s the one time when ideas are really beautiful and amazing and all-encompassing. They are life.

Life is a sweet mistake that happened when the world wasn't looking.

The body, I have often thought, is like a promise. You keep things in it. Those things are covert, immediate, yours. There is something lustrous about them. They emit energy, like radium or appliances. They can be replaced, repaired or simply discarded. The promise of the body is very firm and intact. It's the only promise we can count on, and we can't really count on it very much.