Theres always a moment when everything changes. … If you dont see it c — Elizabeth Hand

"I have to say (regretfully) that Ive seen very little in my real life to indicate the presence of either the supernatural or the divine. As for apocalypse, I was imprinted at an early age with the idea of The End of the World (this also courtesy of the Catholic Church). I can remember being terrified of thunderstorms — Id think, Uh oh, THIS IS IT. I was born in 1957, and grew up in the metropolitan New York area with the Cold War as a backdrop. In kindergarten and first and second grade we had constant air raid drills, sirens going off and that whole "Duck n Cover" drill when you cower under your desk or else hide in the classroom cloak closet, waiting for the Atomic Bomb to drop. I had nightmares about that well into my twenties. For a while in the 1970s I lived near a fire station in D.C., and when the fire sirens would go off at night Id wake up terrified — again — that THIS WAS IT. Of course it never was, but it was good practice at being scared and thinking about scary stuff."

"I think Washington is a magical place. I lived there for thirteen years, and until the day I left I never wanted to live anywhere else. I went back for the first time two years ago, after over a decades absence; it was like seeing an old lover and discovering — with great relief — that the flame is still there. Gore Vidal famously remarked of walking through the city with his grandfather, a senator, and the old man telling him, "Someday all this will make marvelous ruins."

"I was about ten when I first read 1984 and Lord of the Flies, both of which absolutely terrified me — especially 1984, because I figured out that Julia, Winston Smiths lover, would have been born the same year I was. I knew these books were fiction, but I was far too young to have a grasp on the political or cultural realities behind them — I had no distance or detachment from what I read: it seemed too real to me, too possible."

"I liked being alone. Once when I was fourteen, walking in the woods, I stepped from the trees into a field where the long grasses had been flattened by sleeping deer. I looked up into the sky and saw a mirror image of the grass, black and yellow-gray whorls making a slow clockwise rotation like a hurricane. As I stared the whorl began to move more quickly, drawing a darkness into its center until it resembled a vast striated eye that was all pupil, contracting upon itself yet never disappearing. I stared at it until a low buzzing began to sound in my ears. Then I ran. I didnt stop until I reached my driveway. When I finally halted and looked back, the eye was still there, turning. I never mentioned it to anyone. No one else ever spoke of seeing it."

"I never think about genre when I work. Ive written fantasy, science fiction, supernatural fiction, and am now working on a suspense novel. Genres are mostly useful as a marketing tool, and to help booksellers known where to shelve a book."

"So much fantasy relies on the authors having read Frasers The Golden Bough or Robert Graves The White Goddess and nothing else. The White Goddess is a crank book, a crank book of genius of course, but all the same... Mind you, I found Waking the Moon cited in an article in a pagan magazine as an authority for the idea that there was a patriarchal brotherhood, the Benandanti, that have been running things since antiquity, with no mention of the fact that it is a novel, and a fantasy at that. People want to believe something, and so they swallow anything."