When you write a book, you spend day after day scanning and identifying the trees. When you’re done, you have to step back and look at the forest.
I think we rarely recognize the fifth business in our lives at the time those people are changing us.
Reading takes time, and the glass teat takes too much of it.
People don’t get better, they just get smarter. When you get smarter you don’t stop pulling the wings off flies, you just think of better reasons for doing it.
Writing is like being in a dream state or under self-directed hypnosis. It induces a state of recall that – while not perfect – is pretty spooky.
A successful novel should interrupt the reader’s life, make him or her miss appointments, skip meals, forget to walk the dog.
I hated school. I don’t trust anybody who looks back on the years from 14 to 18 with any enjoyment. If you liked being a teenager, there’s something really wrong with you.
Good luck is just bad luck with its hair combed.
When you’re five and you hurt, you make a big noise in the world. At ten you whimper. But by the time you make fifteen you begin to eat the poisoned apples that grow on your own inner tree of pain.
I’m not the first person to have said this – no writer ever feels that the execution of a book lives up to the idea for that book. The execution always falls short.
Sometimes stories cry out to be told in such loud voices that you write them just to shut them up.
Fear can hold you prisoner. Hope can set you free.
He would write it for the reason he felt that all great literature, fiction and nonfiction, was written: truth comes out, in the end it always comes out. He would write it because he felt he had to.
A library is a place where you can live a thousand lives. So why are you waiting when you could be living? Visit your library today.
A good reputation is something that must be earned, yet can never be bought.
I don’t have nightmares; I give them all to you.
If the stuff you’re writing is not for yourself, it won’t work.
Lovecraft opened the way for me, as he had done for others before me.
I have no plans to get an iPad. I know it will do more things than my Kindle, but I don’t want more things. If I want other stuff – movies, TV shows, weather forecasts, the forthcoming Josh Ritter album – I have my Mac.
I have the world’s best job. I get paid to hang out in my imagination all day.