You can't tell people how to feel when they read your work. You can only hope to connect.

Even when our death is imminent, we carry the image of ourselves moving forward, alive, into the future.

I know a lot of people don't listen to music when they're writing because it distracts them, but for me it's almost a way to get into the self-hypnotic state that I need to be in to write.

In some ways all of my fiction is like a conversation I'm having with the writers I read when I was first falling in love with books.

The danger in writing about a world you don't know very well is that you can get lost in it, and sometimes I'll end up with a hundred pages I don't know what to do with.

I always worry that knowing too much about a novel or a story early on in writing will close it down - it feels fatalistic in some way.

I've been reading Peter Straub since I was a teenager, and his work is hardwired into my brain. A Dark Matter contains echoes of all that has been great about Straub's previous work and builds upon it. This Rashomon-like tale is as spooky and frightening as anything he has written, but it's also an intense and moving celebration of love. Out of the darkness comes, ultimately, a surprising and haunting sense of joy.