They discovered that even in the face of pain that seems unbearable, even in the face of pain that wrings the last drop of blood out of your heart and leaves its scrimshaw tracery on the inside of your skull, life goes on. And pain grows dull, and begins to fade.
If you find yourself imitating another writer, that doesn’t have to be a bad thing, especially if you are a young or a new writer. However, you should be conscious of exactly how you are imitating him – word choice, sentence structure, motifs? – and think about why you’re doing it.
Young writers shouldn’t be afraid of striving to emulate their favorites. It’s a good way to learn, as long as you move on from it and don’t publish too many of the results.
I’m your nightmare. Did you think you were done with nightmares, now you’ve become one?
All at once it hit him: this was power too, just as surely as smashing your fist into someone’s face, just as surely as putting a hammer through someone’s skull. The power to make another person crazy with pleasure instead of fear and pain, to have every cell in another person’s body at your thrall.
If you’re a freelance writer and aren’t used to being ignored, neglected, and generally given short shrift, you must not have been in the business very long.
If you want something, you don’t wait for the world to deal it out for you. You take it.
Maybe they did what they had to do to live, and tried to get a little love and have a little fun before the darkness took them.
With the first kiss his mouth will taste of wormwood.
When you have too much faith in something, it’s bound to hurt you. Too much faith in anything will suck you dry. In this way, all the world is a vampire.
Yeah, I think A Confederacy of Dunces is probably the perfect New Orleans book.
I like visiting peoples homes on Saint Josephs Day, when people set up altars, serve food as a tribute to the saint, and invite the public – I enjoy that much more than Mardi Gras.
In France, for instance, one magazine writer was convinced that On The Road had been a huge influence on Lost Souls and was crushed to learn that I hadn’t read the one until after I’d written the other.
I’ve certainly learned a great deal from my husband, though, and could never have written a book like Liquor without him and the people he introduces me to and the stories he brings home.
I don’t like to talk about work in progress, but the novel I’m working on now is definitely not horror.
Horror is the badge of humanity, worn proudly, self-righteously, and often falsely.
You can only maintain an immensely gothic attitude for so long before either killing yourself or beginning to feel like a poser.
I’d much rather do an obviously commercial writing project than get a day job.
There are people who must spend huge amounts of time composing these online diatribes against me, all about how disgusting and terrible I am and how no one should ever read my books, and it’s not enough for them to hate me, they can’t stand the fact that ANYONE likes me!
My mother is an office manager, my father a professor of economics and financial planner.