The hands of every clock are shears, trimming us away scrap by scrap, and every time piece with a digital readout blinks us towards implosion.

There is nothing fatherly about time and what it does to us, either.

I'll sit in the park and feed the pigeons for a while.' We don't have pigeons.' Then I'll feed the pterodactyls.

In a clutch or a corner, I tend to make a weapon out of what is near at hand. That can be anything from a crowbar to a cat, though if I had a choice, I would prefer an angry cat, which I have found to be more effective than a crowbar. Although weaponless, I left the house by the back door, with two chocolate-pumpkin cookies. It's a tough world out there, and a man has to armor himself against it however he can. ~Odd Thomas

Strangely enough, for many many years I didn't talk about my childhood and then when I did I got a ton of mail - literally within a year I got a couple of thousand letters from people who'd had a worse childhood, a similar childhood, a less-bad childhood, and the question that was most often posed to me in those letters was: how did you get past the trauma of being raised by a violent alcoholic?

The biggest advice is being true to what you want to do. Don't worry if other people understand it or don't understand it. If what you're doing has merit, it will find its way.

Too much mystery is merely an annoyance. Too much adventure is exhausting. And a little terror goes a long way.