The voice says, maybe you don't go to hell for the things you do. Maybe you go to hell for the things you don't do. The things you don't finish.
By the time you're thirty, your worst enemy is yourself.
After long enough, everyone in the world will be you enemy.
Some people still think knowledge is power.
trichloroethane [...] All my extensive testing has shown this to be the best treatment for a dangerous excess of human knowledge
...Because love is confusing and strange and difficult and uncomfortable and unbelievable inconvenient. But above all, love is transcendent.
A book is as private and consensual as sex.
This would be...a book that would be a trapdoor down into some place dark. A place only you could go, alone, when you opened the cover. Because only books have that power.
Game shows are designed to make us feel better about the random, useless facts that are all we have left of our education.
Why do I do anything?' she says. 'I'm educated enough to talk myself out of any plan. To deconstruct any fantasy. Explain away any goal. I'm so smart I can negate any dream.
Horror stories give us a way of exhausting our emotions around social issues, like a woman's right to an abortion, which I always thought was the core of 'Rosemary's Baby,' or the backlash against feminism which I always thought was the core to 'Stepford Wives.'
Emotionally, in our minds, we get so filled with resentments where we've got a story about absolutely everything.
There's a television show, 'Hoarders,' where people have those homes filled with stuff. Emotionally, in our minds, we get so filled with resentments where we've got a story about absolutely everything.
The bright future is that readers are accepting more varied forms of stories.
If you don't believe what other people believe, then they'll accuse you of being nihilistic.
Jack Palance was my distant uncle - that's the family gossip. Growing up, my family knew everything about his face getting burned and scarred in the military and how that mutilation led him to become such a famous 'heavy' in films. I prayed for good scars of my own. Not just acne scars.
I wanted to write about the moment when your addictions no longer hide the truth from you. When your whole life breaks down. That's the moment when you have to somehow choose what your life is going to be about.
I've always been very curious about fringe cultures where people temporarily adopt a different social model or way of presenting themselves.
With a book, you're guaranteed the audience has a certain skill level and that the audience has to make an ongoing effort to consume this product and that the project is being consumed by just one person at a time. I really want to play to that strength because it's one of the few advantages books still have.
My best advice for writers is: Have your adventures, make your mistakes, and choose your friends poorly - all these make for great stories.