Home is watching the moon rise over the open, sleeping land and having someone you can call to the window, so you can look together. Home is where you dance with others, and dancing is life.

My feeling of the whole genre, of the terror tale, is this: The best thing that you can do for the readers in this field is to terrify them. It is something that is intellectual, it happens in your mind.

Once I fell in love with books, I fell in love completely.

But now the joy is gone and the sadness is back, the sadness feels like something deserved, the price of some not-quite-forgotten betrayal.

When you write you tell yourself a story. When you rewrite you take out everything that is NOT the story.

The exhilaration was hard to explain. It was a lonely feeling — a somehow melancholy feeling. He was outside; he passed on the wings of the wind, and none of the people beyond the brightly lighted squares of their windows saw him. They were inside, inside where there was light and warmth. They didn't know he had passed them; only he knew. It was a secret thing.

I've spoken out my whole life against the idea of simply dismissing whole areas of fiction by saying it's "genre" and therefore can't be seen as literature.