I have very rarely written autobiographical stuff. "Greasy Lake" and some other works have some autobiographical elements, as does "Birnam Wood," the one I chose to end [this collection] with. I lived in that house and some of my feelings are expressed in it, but it's not autobiography. It was not me and that didn't happen exactly that way.

Music is, by far, the best art. Nothing even comes close. It's so immediate and emotional. In writing, maybe ninety percent of it is the unconscious and ten percent is control. In music, I think it's probably more like ninety-nine percent the unconscious. It's just a beautiful thing happening through you. And so, too, is writing a great story.

The very genetic determinism I posited in World's End as a way of shaking off my inherited demons is being proven in fact as we map out the human genome.

What I'm doing is exploring things. This is why I'm a fiction writer rather than an essayist or a politician or whatever. I just gather material and find a scenario, and see where it takes me. I don't have a plan.

The professorial dictum has always been to write what you know, but I say write what you don't know and find something out. And it works.

Writing is a channeling of an individual experience; so is reading. That's what's so exciting about this art form - it's interactive.

There's a kind of mystery to our being and from my point of view, regarding my own parents and their parents, I'd as soon let it lie than find out who my mother's father was.