If you are faced with a mountain, you have several options. You can climb it and cross to the other side. You can go around it. You can dig under it. You can fly over it. You can blow it up. You can ignore it and pretend it’s not there. You can turn around and go back the way you came. Or you can stay on the mountain and make it your home.

In Lords of Rainbow I start out by taking away color from the world, and in the process show color's vital place in our lives. At least I hope that by the end of the book it's a portion of what the reader comes away with - a sense of how much color perception enriches our lives and how its lack can make our sensory experience incomplete.

If you ask me now, I think every single writer whose work I've read has had some influence upon me, and I continue to be influenced, subtly, by everything I read, like a sponge. But then, what writers aren't? Being a literary sponge is one of the prerequisites for this insanity.

I'll tell you a secret. Old storytellers never die. They disappear into their own story.

I am a novelist at heart.

Neither sugar nor salt tastes particularly good by itself. Each is at its best when used to season other things. Love is the same way. Use it to "season" people.

Imagine a delicious glass of summer iced tea. Take a long cool sip. Listen to the ice crackle and clink. Is the glass part full or part empty? Take another sip. And now?