You have to stay faithful to what you're working on.
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.
I love crime, I love mysteries, and I love ghosts.
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.
Each life makes its own immitation of immortality.
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.
And as a writer, one of the things that I've always been interested in doing is actually invading your comfort space. Because that's what we're supposed to do. Get under your skin, and make you react.
When asked, 'How do you write?' I invariably answer, 'one word at a time.'
The trust of the innocent is the liar's most useful tool.
I never saw any of my dad's stories. My mother said he had piles and piles of manuscripts.
The place where you made your stand never mattered. Only that you were there... and still on your feet.
In small towns people scent the wind with noses of uncommon keenness.
I had a period where I thought I might not be good enough to publish.
Wherever you write is supposed to be a little bit of a refuge, a place where you can get away from the world. The more closed in you are, the more you're forced back on your own imagination.
If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot. There's no way around these two things that I'm aware of, no shortcut.
Life is like a wheel. Sooner or later, it always come around to where you started again.
You cannot hope to sweep someone else away by the force of your writing until it has been done to you.
If you don't have the time to read, you don't have the time or the tools to write.