A: Not only that, but I don't even think there's anything unique about alienation from society between now and when Samuel Pepys wrote his diary, or when Petronius wrote the Satryricon. The friction between the society and the individual people in it has been and will always be a wonderful place to find stories. Part of the joy of being a writer is seeing that, although the wallpaper may change, and the plumbing may be better, the joy and the tragedy of people is that we keep on being people.

Q: You've written novels, comics, books for children, books for young adults, scripts.... Given that, when you were writing Coraline, did you set out to create a book for young people or did the story just unfold in that direction?

A: No, it was very intentional. It's hard enough to convince an adult that you have a real job, if you're a writer, which means it's almost impossible to convince a kid, especially one of your own. Coraline, like The Wolves in the Walls or The Day I Swapped My Dad for 2 Goldfish, was written for my children, because it's good to do things that they will enjoy. Having said that, mostly because I was writing it for my family, it took almost a decade to write.…

Q: Did your move from England to the US have an impact on your writing?

A: I suspect so. Certainly for the first few years after I moved here, I wrote very English things like Neverwhere and Stardust. And then, once I'd been here for a while, I wrote American Gods….

Q: Did work on American Gods begin after you moved to the US? Are the themes in it unique to US culture or was it simply a convenient point of reference?

A: ...which I wrote after I'd been in the US for about 6 years. I started to feel puzzled about the way that the media America I was familiar with from years of American TV and film didn't seem to match the world I was living in. And I wanted to write about the immigrant experience.

I think some of the themes in American Gods are worldwide, but most of them are unique to America, just as America is unique. It's a country the size of a continent, inhabited by immigrants. Everyone came here from somewhere else, a long time ago or recently, and they brought with them the culture and the country they came from, and then they let it go, and became Americans.

And part of being American seems to be the urge to get to the Future as fast as possible.

Q: What was it like to work with Yoshitaka Amano, given that both of you do a synthesis of mythological motifs with contemporary fantasy? What parallels do you see between your writing and his visuals?

A: It was a delight: I loved inventing an ancient Japanese folk tale, and Amano illustrated so well and convincingly that even the Japanese thought it was original. I love the profusion of ideas that Amano comes up with, and his restlessness -- the way he keeps moving and creating new styles and looks and ways of drawing and things to draw.

And, like Amano, I hope I'm still learning...

Q: What are you reading these days?

A: I'm reading an unpublished novel called Lost Boy, Lost Girl by Peter Straub, which is marvellous, and The Power of Babel, a Natural History of Language by John McWhorter, which is fascinating, although as I toured across Europe recently I would tell the people in each country I came to what McWhorter said about their language, and they would explain how that wasn't exactly true.

Interview Date: Spring 2003
Profile and questions compiled by James Stubbs & William Nation, Morrison Regional Library