I am not someone who has hobbies. I have tried knitting, and I can't figure it out.
I think women do have that fatal streak to them that's partly because it's been romanticized, the martyr complex - 'Look what you did to me!'
There's nothing lovelier than having a newborn and still plotting a dark conspiracy.
The number of mystery and horror writers I've met who are just the sanest and the nicest people... it's crazy. Maybe it's because the writing gets something out of the system?
No one watches 'Taxi Driver' and says, 'Oh, it's a male-oriented film.' No one looks at nine-tenths of the films out there that are headlined by men and say, 'It's a male-oriented film.'
For me, suspense is always harder and better than going for the quick, outright scare.
I'm not much of a procedural person. That's not what I'm interested in.
I watched 'Psycho' a million times.
I liked the idea of a whodunit revolving around a marriage.
I grew up in the '80s where there's a lot of these kind of post-apocalyptic, post-comet, post-whatever it was, so that always captured my imagination a lot as a little kid, that idea of getting access to secret places and being able to roam around where you're not supposed to.
Being a novelist, you can roam around with a story and indulge yourself.
I always loved scary movies, and my dad was a film professor.
As much as I really like the screenwriting thing, the novel is where the author has so much control.
I was not a nice little girl. My favorite summertime hobby was stunning ants and feeding them to spiders.
The skill set that lets you be alone in your pyjamas for two years writing a book is not the same skill set that lets you go on television shows like 'The View' or 'Late Night With Jimmy Fallon.'
One of my rules about writing exercises is you never are allowed to put them in your book because it's just too tempting. You try to shoehorn things that don't belong.
I'm all for whatever transitions the book properly to a movie.
We're into this barrage of pop culture - you know, TV, movies, the Internet. We become creatures that we've made up, made of certain different flotsam from pop culture and certain different personas that are in style.
You don't normally see incredibly ugly people who've gone missing and it becomes a sensation.
A great thriller, to me, is more about creating a sense of unease: a queasiness that comes with knowing something is not quite right.
