It had occurred to him that if the undead don’t realize that they are dead, he might easily be one of them himself.

The earliest impetuses for writing, for me, were simply the strange things I happened to notice in my everyday life, stuff I read about in the grocery store tabloids my mom bought, situations that struck me as compelling, anecdotes I’d heard, images, words, metaphors.

I always worry that knowing too much about a novel or a story early on in writing will close it down – it feels fatalistic in some way.

Writing about women’s sexuality is very scary for me because I’m always afraid I’ll get it wrong.

I read a lot, but at the same time I’m not a particularly good or diligent or discriminating reader. I go through maybe close to a thousand or more books a year, but a lot of times I’ll only read bits and pieces of any one individual text.

I know a lot of people don’t listen to music when they’re writing because it distracts them, but for me it’s almost a way to get into the self-hypnotic state that I need to be in to write.

We are always telling stories to ourselves, about ourselves... But we can control those stories... I believe that! Events in our life have meaning because we choose to give it to them.

I keep a daily journal of whatever weird thought comes into my mind, like when I had a dream I was in North Dakota in the middle of a blizzard and for some reason the Egyptian pyramids were there, too – that I was able to shuffle into the book.

You can recognize in your own reading habits what writers are doing that works and what doesn’t. I’m becoming much more aware of that after reading a decade of student stories.

That’s how I work, whether with stories or novels – they start with an image that comes to me in a daydream, and a lot of times I’m walking around with these pictures in my head for awhile before I start writing.