It is failure that guides evolution; perfection provides no incentive for improvement, and nothing is perfect.

You are a New Yorker when what was there before is more real and solid than what is here now.

If I have three ideas and I'm working on one more than the others, that sort of tells me that I should work on that one.

Growing up devouring horror comics and novels, and being inspired to become a writer because of horror novels, movies, and comic books, I always knew I was going to write a horror novel.

I'm not really up on what's new. I'm still listening to Run DMC twenty-five years later. In the same way that the baby-boomers in America were forcing '60s music and Motown down our throats, now people of my generation are forcing Tears For Fears and old Hip Hop upon others.

New York City in life was much like New York City in death. It was still hard to get a cab, for example.

Colored, Negro, Afro-American, African American. ... Every couple of years someone came up with something that got us an inch closer to the truth. Bit by bit we crept along. As if that thing we believed to be approaching actually existed.