“Where do you get ideas for books?”
I’ve been asked this question a lot, and I have to admit it bewilders me. I don’t know what actually spawns them, but the suckers are everywhere, like ants at a picnic, like wasps at a barbecue. They come to me in the night, born of dream fragments or of lying awake worrying about the state of the world and the creatures in it. They pop up out of books I’m reading. They lie in wait on pages of newspapers and magazines, on the TV screen, in snippets of casual conversation.