If God gives you something you can do, why in God’s name wouldn’t you do it?
The world, although well-lighted with fluorescents and incandescent bulbs and neon, is still full of odd dark corners and unsettling nooks and crannies.
Once again there was the desert, and that only.
I believe in evil, but all my life I’ve gone back and forth about whether or not there’s an outside evil, whether or not there’s a force in the world that really wants to destroy us, from the inside out, individually and collectively.
Let me tell you something my friend. Hope is a dangerous thing. Hope can drive a man insane.
I’m a slow reader, but I usually get through seventy or eighty books a year, most fiction. I don’t read in order to study the craft; I read because I like to read.
Anything with the power to make you laugh over thirty years later isn’t a waste of time. I think something like that is very close to immortality.
The most important things are the hardest to say.
May be she’ll learn something about what death really is, which is where the pain stops and the good memories begin. Not the end of life but the end of pain.
I like to think that good people win. But even good people have other sides. Most people will slow down to get a good look at an accident, even though they won’t admit it.
Nightmares exist outside of logic, and there’s little fun to be had in explanations; they’re antithetical to the poetry of fear.
Art should be a place of hope.
I never met a writer who wasn’t lazy.
If you intend to write as truthfully as you can, your days as a member of polite society are numbered.
If you wrote something for which someone sent you a check, if you cashed the check and it didn’t bounce, and if you then paid the light bill with the money, I consider you talented.
Hemingway sucks. If I set out to write that way, it would have been been hollow and lifeless because it wasn’t me.
Might as well try to drink the ocean with a spoon as argue with a lover.
The idea that creative endeavor and mind-altering substances are entwined is one of the great pop-intellectual myths of our time.
Harry Potter is about confronting fears, finding inner strength and doing what is right in the face of adversity. Twilight is about how important it is to have a boyfriend.
They’re animals, all right. But why are you so goddam sure that makes us human beings?