Stories are the things that allow us to persuade each other that we’re human.
One thing that I get from a lot of people with American Gods is people saying that they would love some kind of glossary with a list of all the Gods and who they are, so that they can look them up.
For me, the glory of my first 25 years as a writer was I could put things off as long as I wanted.
You can buy a book new, buy it in hardback or wait for the paperback, find it used or as a collectible. I don’t mind. What I care about most is that people are reading.
That’s sexism, that is. Going around giving people girly presents just because they’re a girl.
Trees there were, old as trees can be, huge and grasping with hearts black as sin. Strange trees that some said walked in the night.
Even if your goose habitually lays golden eggs, it will still be cooked.
The Time Lords really didn’t like genocide. I’m not too keen on it myself. It’s the potential you’re killing off. What if, one day, there was a good Dalek? What if...
Leave no path untaken.
Stories you read when you’re the right age never quite leave you. You may forget who wrote them or what the story was called.
What would be the fun in doing things you know are going to work?
I don’t know why people would want to have lunch with writers. I’ve eaten with writers. We have appalling table manners, and rarely say anything other than ‘Pass the salt’ or ‘If you’re not going to eat that, can I have it?’
Anything that keeps you happy and writing is part of my writing ritual: I like music, so I tend to have it playing in the background. But if I’m interested, I can write in an airport waiting areas.
Because, if one is writing novels today, concentrating on the beauty of the prose is right up there with concentrating on your semi-colons, for wasted effort.
Every now and then I’ll do little things, a short story or something, that doesn’t have any fantastical elements, but mostly I like the power of playing God and I like to imagine things.
I don’t think I’m mainstream. I think what I am is lots and lots of different cults. And when you get lots and lots of small groups who like you a lot, they add up to a big group without ever actually becoming mainstream.
I loved writing a book in which, in some ways, it’s very, very classical, and in some ways I’m breaking lots of rules about what you can do and what you can’t do.
I suspect there are two kinds of novelists. Those who have a point of view and have something to say and then write a novel in order to say that thing, and those of us who write the book in order to find out what we think about that thing.
I was a scholarship minor public school day boy at Ardingly College and later Whitgift School. Then, straight into work as a journalist – a wonderful thing for a writer.
I’ve been blogging since February of 2001. When I started blogging, it was a dinosaur blog. It was me and a handful of tyrannosaurs. We’d be writing blog entries like, ‘The tyrannosaurus is getting grumpy.’