I want to write about people who dream and wait for the night to end, who long for the light so they can hold the ones they love.

Well, finally, once you become an orphan, you're an orphan till the day you die. I keep having the same dream. I'm seven years old and an orphan again. All alone, with no adults around to take care of me. It's evening, and the light is fading, and night is pressing in. It's always the same. In the dream I always go back to being seven years old. Software like that you can't exchange once it's contaminated.

This life is nothing but a short, painful dream.

Writing novels is much the same. You gather up bones and make your gate, but no matter how wonderful the gate might be, that alone doesn't make it a living breathing novel. A story is not something of this world. A real story requires a kind of magical baptism to link the world on this side with the world on the other side.

Your readers have seen a sky with one moon in it any number of times, right? But I doubt they've seen a sky with two moons in it side by side. When yoy introduce things that most readers have never seen before into a piece of fiction, you have to describe them with as much precision and in as much detail as possible. What you can eliminate from fiction is the description of what most readers have seen.

Well, look at it another way: why shouldn’t there be cats in a zoo?" I said.

"They’re animals, too, right?"

"Cats and dogs are your run-of-the-mill-type animals. Nobody’s going to pay money to see them," he said. "Just look around you-they’re everywhere. Same thing with people.