The Sleep lasted six hours. For most of that time John lay beside Miriam watching the shadows.

The interesting thing about fiction from a writer’s standpoint is that the characters come to life within you. And yet who are they and where are they? They seem to have as much or more vitality and complexity as the people around you.

It is very easy to claim a theory of everything if you get to decide what that everything is. It is very easy to explain everything on the table if you have put everything you cannot explain underneath it in the wastebasket.

I’m not so sure that horror should be dismissed as something less than literature.

I’ve got lots of books sitting here that have never been published because nobody could make any marketing sense of them.

Maybe that’s what the quasars that stand sentinel at the end of the universe are all about – they are the spots where people like Socrates and Christ dug through; they are windows into bright and terrible wisdom. They are warnings.

I put the copy of ‘A Christmas Carol’ that my grandfather had first read to me 60 years ago on my desk, and I began to write. The result, for better or for worse, is the ‘Christmas Spirits.’ I plan to read it to my grandson.

In them was not the savage blankness of the reptile species. Instead there was something far worse – burning, unquenchable rage mixed with the self-mocking irony of great intelligence.

Every time someone ends a prayer in the Western world they say Amen – that is the name of an Egyptian god associated with completion. So we’re still praying to their gods.

The truth is, everything ultimately comes down to the relationship between the reader and the writer and the characters. Does or does not a character address moral being in a universal and important way? If it does, then it’s literature.