I looked at the world of books and just went, Oh my gosh, if I'm writing novels, I'm on the same shelves as Jane Austen and Charles Dickens and Petronius - whereas with comics, they've only been doing them for a hundred years, and there's stuff that nobody's done before. I think I'll go off and do some of the stuff no one's ever done before.
To journalists my move from comics to films to best-selling novels was resembling those little evolutionary maps too much, where you see the fish, and then it can walk, and then it's an ape and then it gets up on its hind legs and finally it is a man. I didn't like that. I didn't like the fact that there was something rather amphibious about me - at least in their heads - back when I was writing comics. So I like continuing to write comics, if only because it points out that I haven't just started to walk upright or left the water.
Everything has to be intrinsic plot-wise in the same way, to use the Linda Williams analogy but to move it on a bit, as musicals - in old musicals, like in an old Cole Porter musical, you get the action, then they do a song, which reflects a moment - everything stops while that is being sung - and then you restart. These days in most musicals, the plot keeps moving through the song. I think it would be nice if someone constructed some pornography where the sex continues to propel you through the story.
If people are standing up there saying, my football team just won with help from God, then obviously God just pissed over the other team.
Anywhere that I can't check my email is a good place to write!
It seems to me that one of the most interesting things about God as a concept, if you decide to believe in God, is that God's ways are unknowable. And God obviously, look at the world around you, does or is responsible for some terrible, terrible, awful things. A young girl kidnapped and kept in the darkness and sexually abused. The deaths of six million Jews. A mudslide that buries a village. All of these things. If God is doing the good stuff, he's got to be doing that stuff too.
If you give a writer a pile of blank paper and say you can write anything you like on any subject you want at any length you want, you will probably never get anything at all, whereas if you have 900 words to write, and it's fiction that is somehow op-ed fiction, and it needs to tie in with Halloween . . . okay, those are my constraints, that's where I now need to start building something.
There are characters in some short stories who exist as people, and there are other characters in different short stories who exist as purely literary constructs. You know, the young man in "Forbidden Brides of the Faceless Slaves in the Secret House of the Night of Dread Desire" - I probably got that right - is a literary construct, and enjoys being a literary construct. He has no life off stage, whereas the young men in "How to Talk to Girls at Parties" were as near to being real human beings as I could possibly get them.
If writing a novel is a year's exile to a foreign country, writing a short story is a weekend spent somewhere exotic. They're much more like vacations, more exciting and different, and you're off.
There's definitely a feeling with a short story that it's pure story telling. You're not really worried about theme. You're not going to stay with the characters long enough to live your life with them. And you have different kinds of relationships with them.
I used to get my best ideas from being bored, and now, if I even think I'm being faintly bored, I have two million Twitter followers I can engage with. It's great, but I also think it's important to be able to let your thoughts flow and percolate.
One thing that's interesting to me is how we as humans seem to be losing our ability to stand still and be alone with our thoughts. If you want to, you have to arrange it now. You have to go off where there's no WiFi and leave your equipment behind, but still have some sort of GPS tracking to make sure you don't get lost or die.
You think you're being given all of these things: phones that can communicate with other devices, car service that's better than a taxi, all of these amazing things that are available to you at any time. It isn't until you've swum across the river that you can start to see the negative aspects of it all.
I always figure there are novels and short stories, and in those, I'm God. No one tells me what to do. I don't have to lose a page, or cut anything, it's just mine. Then there are other things where you're up against realities.
If you go to space, you'll look down and see no national boundaries. You'll never see the gods people are killing each other over, but they're incredibly real.
In comics, collaboration saves your life. How well you can work with an artist, a colorist, a letterer, is how good your comic is.
When I was very young, I would occasionally stick 'f****' where I knew something contentious might happen so that the editor could remove the word 'f***' very proudly and leave whatever else was around it.
My ideal reader is me. And yes, my ideal reader comes with me and is forgiving.
The lovely thing about writing comics for so many years is that comics is a medium that is mistaken for a genre. It's not that there are not genres within comics, but because comics tend to be regarded as a genre in itself, content becomes secondary; as long as I was doing a comic, people would pick it up.
Coming over from England, I was awe-struck by what Americans do at Halloween. I find it magnificent. In England, you get the occasional fancy dress party.
The imagination and the place that dreams come from is so huge and so important. I'm trying to write about the real world, in that I'm trying to write about whatever it is the experience that makes us human, the things that we have in common.
People are icebergs. So much of us is underneath.
I think that the biggest, quickest and hardest thing to learn for a writer is that what we think of as the unchanging verities of story are a load of bollocks. Absolute rubbish. There are no unchanging verities.
With American Gods I was trying very, very consciously - there was a level at which it was a little like trying to write a novel in French - you know, "this novel is to be written in American."
I would not describe myself as a political writer except in the sense that the personal is political, which is something that I do strongly believe. And in that sense American Gods is a very personal novel and a political novel. I was trying to describe the experience of coming to America as an immigrant, the experience of watching the way that America tends to eat other cultures.
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