"It's true that, in my books, monsters are always important. People are monsters, people are called monsters by other characters, and so on. Really, there are three kinds of things that are important in my things, I think. One is monsters, another is clowns, and another is human beings, and of course, they keep shapeshifting. One turns into the other. Clowns are always trying to be human beings. What I mean by clowns is this: Human beings do things and clowns desperately try to imitate human beings, so the acrobat gets up on the wire, and then the clown wants to be an acrobat and he tries, but he's a straw man and he can't be. He's always acting. He's always pretending. He's always faking and mimicking. Many of us feel that about ourselves all the time. That is to say, we put on masks and never find out who we really are. And one of the things that happens in a novel is characters who start out as clowns try to earn the grade as human beings, and sometimes they turn into monsters instead. Monsters are those things that I used to go to Saturday afternoon movies and see. I mean by monsters, "walking dead". I mean nihilists. People who really have given up on all faith and so on, and act as if the world were evil, and as if all people were either stupid or malicious. They're creatures who have given in to the emotional war that's in everybody. Sometimes, I use, for instance, in Henry Soames in Nickel Mountain, a monstrous kind of body which contains monstrous emotions, but he's holding it in, and the thing of course, finally, is that he really is a monster and he's holding it in and that makes him human, that constantly he does what he knows is right, whatever the power of his emotions. So, your monsters are everywhere."