In small towns people scent the wind with noses of uncommon keenness.
Americans are apocalyptic by nature. The reason why is that we’ve always had so much, so we live in deadly fear that people are going to take it away from us.
When you ask me what I’m afraid of, I’d say I still go to see ghost movies when I get a chance or some sort of supernatural being, but it doesn’t scare me as it scared me when I was a child.
I never saw any of my dad’s stories. My mother said he had piles and piles of manuscripts.
We’re news junkies in my house.
As we get older, our fears, in some way, sharpen and become more personal, because we can no longer – let’s say take a book like “It” or maybe “Christine,” and say these are make-believe fears.
What charitable 1 percenters can’t do is assume responsibility – America’s national responsibilities: the care of its sick and its poor, the education of its young, the repair of its failing infrastructure, the repayment of its staggering war debts.
Like anything else that happens on its own, the act of writing is beyond currency. Money is great stuff to have, but when it comes to the act of creation, the best thing is not to think of money too much. It constipates the whole process.
Well, I’m like a drug addict, I’m always saying I’m going to stop, and then I don’t, what I’ve said consistently is that I hope I know when to stop: when it starts to get repetitive.
We like to think about how smart we are. But I think talent as a writer is hard-wired in, it’s all there, at least the basic elements of it. You can’t change it any more than you can choose whether to be right handed or left handed.
Wherever you write is supposed to be a little bit of a refuge, a place where you can get away from the world. The more closed in you are, the more you’re forced back on your own imagination.
He had a massive stroke. He died with his tie on. Do you think that could be our generation’s equivalent of that old saying about dying with your boots on?
That’s something that is almost accidental at the beginning of a career, but the more you write, the more trained you are to recognize the little signals.
In the stutter-flashes of light, the clouds look like huge transparent brains filled with bad thoughts.
It’s actually against my religion to laugh at men who are toting guns.
There are things of such darkness and horror – just, I suppose, as there are things of such great beauty – that they will not fit through the puny human doors of perception.
As a kid, death seemed boring to me. As an adult, I think that it seems more like a waste of everything. Somebody once said every time a professor dies, a library burns.
If anyone ever asks you what panic is, now you can tell them: an emotional blank spot that leaves you feeling as if you’ve been sucking on a mouthful of pennies.
God and the afterlife and all that is certainly a subject that’s interested me, and I think it interests me more the older that I get.
As infants, our first victory comes in grasping some bit of the world, usually our mother’s fingers. Later we discover that the world, and the things of the world, are grasping us, and have been all along.