For the most part my friends can always be more entertaining than the tube ever can be.

If you start in the pit of despair with these profane, awful things, even a glimmer of hope or awareness is going to occur that's much brighter coming from this dark, awful beginning.

We've been speaking English as a second language so long that we've forgotten it as our first.

Ideas come at any moment -- except when you demand them. Most ideas come while I'm physically active, at the gym, with friends, gardening, so I always carry pen and paper. My first draft is always written in longhand. But once the first dozen chapters, more like short stories, are written, then momentum builds until I can't leave the project until it's done.

That’s how a scary story works. It echoes some ancient fear. It re-creates some forgotten terror. Something we’d like to think we’ve grown beyond. But it can still scare us to tears. It’s something you’d hoped was healed.

My theory is that church used to be that place. Instead of being a place where you went to look good, it was a place where you could risk going every week to look your worst.

I think we're in an age starved for genuine experiences, instead of cathartic phony experiences through the media, structured, engineered experiences. And those are the fast food, the masturbation of experience. They don't really exhaust any aspect of ourselves; they don't make us any stronger.