There's not going to be a 'Buffy' season nine on television.

I find that when you read a script, or rewrite something, or look at something that's been gone over, you can tell, like rings on a tree, by how bad it is, how long it's been in development.

Everybody who labels themselves a 'nerd' isn't some giant person locked in a cubbyhole who's never seen the opposite sex. Especially with the way the Internet is now, I think that definition is getting a little more diffuse.

There are two things that interest me - and they're both power, ultimately. One is not having it and one is abusing it.

When I created Buffy, I wanted to create a female icon, but I also wanted to be very careful to surround her with men that not only have no problem with the idea of a female leader, but were in fact engaged and even attracted to the idea.

I'm a very hard-line, angry atheist. Yet I am fascinated by the concept of devotion.

As far as I am concerned, the first episode of Buffy was the beginning of my career. It was the first time I told a story from start to finish the way I wanted.

TV does a thing that film can never do. It takes you to a place that no novel written after the late 19th century can. You can just go through people's lives; it's like a marriage.

I never tire of the heroes that I knew growing up.

It's a good rule of thumb, it seems to me: if you're not allowed to see where something comes from, don't put it in your mouth.

The best books are the ones that ask the most questions.

My greatest fear is feeling like a professional novelist. Somebody who creates characters, who sits down and has pieces of paper taped to the wall - what's going to happen in this scene, or this act. What I like is for it to be a much more scary, sloppy reflection of who I am.

Why do I write? It's not that I want people to think I am smart, or even that I am a good writer. I write because I want to end my loneliness.

I need an office, so I can have a place where I don't write.

I always write out of a need to read something, rather than a need to write something.

You write to please yourself, you write to move yourself, to engage yourself in the asking of questions that are important to you.

Words are capable of making experience more vivid, and also of organizing it. They can scare us, and they can comfort us.

I often think about how my sons will come to know about September 11th. Something overheard? A newspaper image? In school? I would prefer that they learn about it from my wife and me, in a deliberate and safe way. But it's hard to imagine ever feeling ready to broach the subject without some impetus.

When you read something you have written, you have to confront some of the lies you have been telling yourself.

People always ask what a book is about, as if it has to be about something. I don't want to write books that lend themselves to that sort of description. My books are more a kind of breaking-down.

In America right now, we use words like 'smart' to talk about bombs. American rhetoric is grounded in ideas of capital-G Good, capital-E Evil, and it's very clear who is on which side. But in a book you can do just the opposite. You can use all lower-case words.

It's rarely talked about, but hunting for sport is just about as vile as we humans get.

When it comes to meat, change is almost always cast as an absolute. You are a vegetarian or you are not.

Jews have a special relationship to books, and the Haggadah has been translated more widely, and reprinted more often, than any other Jewish book. It is not a work of history or philosophy, not a prayer book, user's manual, timeline, poem or palimpsest - and yet it is all these things.