Sleep is like a cat: It only comes to you if you ignore it.
I’m a huge fan of ghost stories, that sort of slow build, the suspense and the questioning about whether you’re imagining something or if it’s real.
Love makes you want to be a better man. But maybe love, real love, also gives you permission to just be the man you are.
Don’t be discouraged – every relationship you have is a failure, until you find the right one.
I have a meanness inside me, real as an organ. Slit me at my belly and it might slide out, meaty and dark, drop on the floor so you could stomp on it.
My imagination is more tweaked by imagining the lives of the people who were there before us. I don’t need to give myself the willies. I’m quite good at that – I can freak myself out wherever I am.
There’s a difference between really loving someone and loving the idea of her.
There’s something disturbing about recalling a warm memory and feeling utterly cold.
I like the discipline of writing a script. You can’t go into the character’s head – you have to find these creative ways to help externalize what they’re thinking.
It’s a very difficult era in which to be a person, just a real, actual person, instead of a collection of personality traits selected from an endless Automat of characters.
It’s humbling, to become the very thing you once mocked.
I have four or five ideas that just keep floating around and I want to kind of just let one – like a beautiful butterfly, let it land somewhere.
I think there is something very relatable in the idea that you hit a certain age, later in your life, where you realize you have to pick up the rug and see what’s underneath it and deal with stuff.
It was surprising that you could spend hours in the middle of the night pretending things were OK, and know in thirty seconds of daylight that that simply wasn’t so.
You drink a little too much and try a little too hard. And you go home to a cold bed and think, that was fine. And your life is a long line of fine.
The truly frightening flaw in humanity is our capacity for cruelty – we all have it.
People focus on the darker female characters in my books, but for every one of those, I can also show you an equally screwed up man that no one ever comments about, or a nicer woman that no one comments about.
The worst feeling: when you just have to wait and prepare yourself for the lie.
Sometimes if you let people do things to you, you’re really doing it to them.
Most beautiful, good things were done by women people scorn.