If you are writing any book about the end of the world, what you are really writing about is what’s worth saving about it.
Behind every writer stands a very large bookshelf.
This ravishing world. This achingly bittersweet, ravishing world.
Even on the darkest night, my friend, life will have its way.
What strange places our lives can carry us to, what dark passages.
And indeed, I am a warmhearted and thoroughly domestic man who gets up and makes pancakes for his children and kisses them on the head when he sends them off to their day.
She remembered no one at all. She remembered one day thinking: I am alone. There is no I but I. She lived in the dark. She taught herself to walk in the light, though it was not easy.
It’s different being afraid when there’s the hope it will amount to something.
The sadness you feel is not your own. It’s his sadness you feel in your heart, Amy, for missing you.
I saw my one purpose in that moment, looking into that little girls eyes. I was the one who was meant to save her, that was my one purpose all this time.
I like to break left when people think I’m going to go right.
I like creating villains.
So perhaps the greatest worry of all was that one day you would realize that all the worries of your life amounted to one thing: the desire to just stop worrying.
When you write, you take the ball and you hold it up to the light and you turn it slowly, and let people draw their own conclusions. And try to bring empathy to all sides of the equation.
I have any number of completely dark obsessions and fascinations, and none of this was present in my profile or my growing profile as a writer.
My inventing time is all done under the influence of aerobic exercise. Basically, I do all my thinking while I run.
I came to Houston for a job, the reason most people move halfway across the country with a first grader and a five-week-old. I came here to teach at Rice.
I grew up during the Cold War, when everything seemed very tenuous. For many years, right up until the fall of the Berlin Wall, I had vivid nightmares of nuclear apocalypse.
I’m a workmanlike writer. I show up every day and treat it like a job. The old rule that writing is like any other job, the first rule is that you must show up. I’m at the keyboard from 9 to 4 every day.
I’m still an English professor at Rice University here in Houston. They’ve been very generous in letting me on a very long leash to just work on ‘The Passage’ and its sequels.