Don’t let the sun go down without saying thank you to someone, and without admitting to yourself that absolutely no one gets this far alone.
I work until beer o’clock.
I always drank, from when it was legal for me to drink. And there was never a time for me when the goal wasn’t to get as hammered as I could possibly afford to. I never understood social drinking, that’s always seemed to me like kissing your sister.
I’m going to be dead for a long time, so I have a lot to do now.
Somebody asked Somerset Maugham about his place in the pantheon of writers, and he said, “I’m in the very front row of the second rate.” I’m sort of haunted by that.
When you write, you want to get rid of the world, don’t you? Of course you do. When you’re writing, you’re creating your own worlds.
Above all else, be consistent.
Only enemies speak the truth; friends and lovers lie endlessly, caught in the web of duty.
People think that I must be a very strange person. This is not correct. I have the heart of a small boy. It is in a glass jar on my desk.
I never have a thematic intention at the outset. The story informs the theme for me rather than the other way around. But as it happens, this is, at least to a degree, about getting old and the rapid passage of our lives.
French is the language that turns dirt into romance.
I watched Titanic when I got back home from the hospital, and cried. I knew that my IQ had been damaged.
God is cruel. Sometimes he makes you live.
A lot of us grow up and we grow out of the literal interpretation that we get when we’re children, but we bear the scars all our life. Whether they’re scars of beauty or scars of ugliness, it’s pretty much in the eye of the beholder.
I was in enough to get along with people. I was never socially inarticulate. Not a loner. And that saved my life, saved my sanity. That and the writing. But to this day I distrust anybody who thought school was a good time. Anybody.
We make up horrors to help us cope with the real ones.
I love crime, I love mysteries, and I love ghosts.
The first movie I ever saw was a horror movie. It was Bambi. When that little deer gets caught in a forest fire, I was terrified, but I was also exhilarated.
You have to stay faithful to what you’re working on.
When asked, ‘How do you write?’ I invariably answer, ‘one word at a time.’