Each reader needs to bring his or her own mind and heart to the text.
Books were this wonderful escape for me because I could open a book and disappear into it, and that was the only way out of that house when I was a kid.
Some days I'm lucky to squeeze out a page of copy that pleases me, but I get as many as six or seven pages on a very good day; the average is probably three pages.
In my books, I never portray violence as a reasonable solution to a problem. If the lead characters in the story are driven to it, it's at the extreme end of their experience.
I believe that I was a dog in a past life. That's the only thing that would explain why I like to snack on Purina Dog Chow.
Readers will stay with an author, no matter what the variations in style and genre, as long as they get that sense of story, of character, of empathetic involvement.
The hands of every clock are shears, trimming us away scrap by scrap, and every time piece with a digital readout blinks us towards implosion.
If someone wrote it and it had a peculiar twist, I've read it.
Because people see violence on the movie screen, they're not going to go out and hold up a liquor store and kill somebody. It really doesn't correlate.
I think the world is full of evil people. I think in some ways we're in more danger now than before.
I try not to spend too much time on partisan politics. Life's too short for that. I don't really believe that there have been many human problems solved by politics.
The only reason I would write a sequel is if I were struck by an idea that I felt to be equal to the original. Too many sequels diminish the original.
I receive about 10,000 letters a year from readers, and in the first year after a book is published, perhaps 5,000 letters will deal specifically with that piece of work.
Vladimir Nabokov said the two great evils of the 20th century were Marx and Freud. He was absolutely correct.
Sometimes there is no darker place than our thoughts, the moonless midnight of the mind.
I don't find slashing and blood flying everywhere to be scary. I just find it repulsive.
I think it's perfectly just to refuse service to anyone based on behavior, but not based on race or religion.