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I suppose I have an active imagination, and writing allows me to live it out.

Once you start writing something obsessively, it's almost like someone has to rip it from your hands in order for you to put it down.

With me, writing is 60% imagination, 30% people you know and 10% you don't know where it comes from.

You've probably never thought about it before unless you happen to write for a living, but professional writers are doomed to spend most of their waking hours sitting by themselves at a desk, staring at a blank computer screen and waiting for lightning to strike.

Writing is hard. I mean, I sit there and work at it.

People imagine that there are rituals, like lighting candles or sacrificing chickens. They really just want to know what the magic formula is for writing. I inevitably disappoint them by saying you just put your butt in the chair, and you write 500 words a day, and then you get up and repeat it the next morning.

There's something magical about the idea that you can write something down and someone else can read it. I'm still mildly agog about that.

People seem to have trouble with the imagination. They can't believe that you can just pull things out of your brain like that.

I'm not one of those writers I learned about who get up in the morning, put a piece of paper in their typewriter machine and start writing. That I've never understood.

The tough thing about writing is you go into a room alone, you close the door and you do your work.