All you can do is hope for a pattern to emerge, and sometimes it never does. Still, with a plan, you only get the best you can imagine. I'd always hoped for something better than that.

My first time I jacked off, I thought I'd invented it. I looked down at my sloppy handful of junk and thought, This is going to make me rich.

What I'm always trying to do with every book is to recreate the effect of the stories we heard as children in front of campfires and fireplaces - the ghost stories that engaged us.

The air will always be to filled with something. Your body too sore or tired. Your father too drunk. Your wife too cold. You will always have some excuse not to live your life.

Some of us are lucky enough to fall in love once or twice but the luckiest of us are those who find that someone they simply can't live without and have the pleasure of falling in love with them day in and day out for the rest of their lives. Relationships aren't about simply falling in love once and being done with it, they're about loving someone until the end of your days and growing that love endlessly.

Hysteria is impossible without an audience. Panicking by yourself is the same as laughing alone in an empty room. You feel really silly.

Leonardo's Mona Lisa is just a thousand thousand smears of paint. Michelangelo's David is just a million hits with a hammer. We're all of us a million bits put together the right way.