We make up horrors to help us cope with the real ones.
The devil's voice is sweet to hear.
Only enemies speak the truth; friends and lovers lie endlessly, caught in the web of duty.
When asked, 'How do you write?' I invariably answer, 'one word at a time.'
But I think there are a set of experiences that turn a potential writer into a working writer, and then there are places in your life were you start to recognize what you want to do.
You see something, then it clicks with something else, and it will make a story. But you never know when it's going to happen.
You can't deny laughter; when it comes, it plops down in your favorite chair and stays as long as it wants.
We've switched from a culture that was interested in manufacturing, economics, politics - trying to play a serious part in the world - to a culture that's really entertainment-based.
I can remember being home from school with tonsillitis and writing stories in bed to pass the time.
Every book you pick up has its own lesson or lessons, and quite often the bad books have more to teach than the good ones.
I've always believed in God. I also think that's the sort of thing that either comes as part of the equipment, the capacity to believe, or at some point in your life, when you're in a position where you actually need help from a power greater than yourself, you simply make an agreement.
You have to stay faithful to what you're working on.
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.
I recognize terror as the finest emotion and so I will try to terrorize the reader. But if I find that I cannot terrify, I will try to horrify, and if I find that I cannot horrify, I'll go for the gross-out. I'm not proud.
In small towns people scent the wind with noses of uncommon keenness.
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.
Monsters are real, and ghosts are real too. They live inside us, and sometimes, they win.
I love the movies, and when I go to see a movie that's been made from one of my books, I know that it isn't going to be exactly like my novel because a lot of other people have interpreted it. But I also know it has an idea that I'll like because that idea occurred to me, and I spent a year, or a year and a half of my life working on it.
The trust of the innocent is the liar's most useful tool.