I was the kind of person who knew what he wanted to do; I wanted to write, I wanted not to be in school, and I felt that university would just be spending another four years of my life before I could write.
While clothes do not, as the saying would sometimes have it, make the man, and fine feathers do not make fine birds, sometimes they can add a certain spice to a recipe.
Anyone who believes what a cat tells him deserves all he gets.
The strangest part of being so well known is definitely getting a New Yorker profile. It’s a wonderful, strange process, like seeing yourself through a distorting mirror.
I like horror, but I tend to like it as seasoning. I’d get very bored if I was told I had to write a horror novel. I’d love to write a novel with horror elements, but too much, and it doesn’t taste of anything else.
There are so many fragile things, after all. People break so easily, and so do dreams and hearts.
I don’t want whatever I want. Nobody does. Not really. What kind of fun would it be if I just got everything I ever wanted just like that, and it didn’t mean anything? What then?
There was once a young man who wished to gain his Heart’s Desire.
Even nothing cannot last forever.
We owe it to each other to tell stories.
The future came and went in the mildly discouraging way that futures do.
There are three things, and three things only, that can lift the pain of mortality and ease the ravages of life. These are wine, women and song.
I tend to think of fear and humour as very, very close together. And to be honest I think pornography completes the triangle, because they are things that to work need to evoke a certain reaction.
The important thing to understand about American history, wrote Mr. Ibis, in his leather-bound journal, is that it is fictional, a charcoal-sketched simplicity for the children, or the easily bored.
But I have always thought that these tulips must have had names. They were red, and orange and red, and red and orange and yellow, like the ember in a nursery fire of a winter’s evening. I remember them.
Write. Finish things. Get them published. Write something else while you’re waiting for someone to publish the first thing...
Librarians are the coolest people out there doing the hardest job out there on the frontlines. And every time I get to encounter or work with librarians, I’m always impressed by their sheer awesomeness.
Really, he thought, if you couldn’t trust a poet to offer sensible advice, who could you trust?
You’ve a good heart. Sometimes that’s enough to see you safe wherever you go. But mostly, it’s not.
A short story is the ultimate close-up magic trick – a couple of thousand words to take you around the universe or break your heart.