I came from a house full of books, so I took reading for granted. I was an outdoorsy little kid, too, so I got the best of both worlds by taking books up trees and reading there.

If you're writing a scene for a character with whom you disagree in every way, you still need to show how that character is absolutely justified in his or her own mind, or the scene will come across as being about the author's views rather than about the character's.

I thought I could never write a proper book; I'd never done it before. But I thought I could write a sequence. Then I had a chapter. The next thing I knew I was turning acting down.

Take what you want and pay for it, says God. You can have anything you want, as long as you accept that there is a price and you will have to pay it.

I don't do that kind of negativity. If you put your energy into thinking about how much the fall would hurt, you're already halfway down.

I am not good at noticing when I'm happy, except in retrospect.

Now death is uncool, old-fashioned. To my mind the defining characteristic of our era is spin, everything tailored to vanishing point by market research, brands and bands manufactured to precise specifications; we are so used to things transmuting into whatever we would like them to be that it comes as a profound outrage to encounter death, stubbornly unspinnable, only and immutably itself.