...evil fascinates and repels us - it's a terrible beauty that enthralls us the more we stare into it...

...it begins with isolation - demons always inhabit desolate places...

...nobody ever takes from the desert anything but aridity and monsters...

I need to tell you a story, a tale of fate and emergence.

He prefers his adventures second hand.

It's in The Lord of the Rings, I think, where one of the characters says that "way leads on to way"; that you could start at a path leading nowhere more fantastic than from your own front steps to the sidewalk, and from there you could go . . . well, anywhere at all. It's the same way with stories. One leads to the next, to the next, and to the next; maybe they go in the direction you wanted to go, but maybe they don't. Maybe in the end it's the voice that tells the stories more than the stories themselves that matters.