Thursday, 4 October 2001 : ""

"My worst fantasy was a really cool one. I got to kidnap all of the authors whose work I liked, living and dead -- I got to go 'round and round up G.K. Chesterton and Geoffrey Chaucer and all of these guys. Then I got to lock them in an enormous castle and make them collaborate on these huge-plot books. And I would tell them what the plots were. // I was about 10 years old. And I plotted this 12-volume giant epic about these people going off to collect these rocks from all over the universe. // As daydreams go, it says an awful lot about me as a young man: I wasn't confident enough about my ability to come up with stories. I was coming up with this huge, intricate story in order to justify in my daydreams of creating stories."

"I enjoy not being famous. I drive my publicist mad by declining to do things like the David Letterman show or People magazine (another AOL Time Warner company), because I don't particularly like being a personality, I like being about the story I'm telling, I like being about the books."