If Edgar Allan Poe were alive today, his agent would be constantly slapping him upside the head with tightly rolled copies of his brilliant short stories and novelettes, yelling, 'Full-length novels, you moron! Pay attention! What's the matter with you -- are you shooting heroin or something? Write for the market! No more of this midlength 'Fall of the House of Usher' crap

When new hopes fail, old hopes return in the endless cycle of desperation.

My life has a mysterious purpose that I don't understand, and day by day, conflict by conflict, I learn by going where I have to go.

Every human being has appetites difficult to control but far fewer have humility, gentleness, and an awareness of their weaknesses.

The problem with movies and books is they make evil look glamorous, exciting, when it's no such thing. It's boring and it's depressing and it's stupid. Criminals are all after cheap thrills and easy money, and when they get them, all they want is more of the same, over and over. They're shallow, empty, boring people who couldn't give you five minutes of interesting conversation if you had the piss-poor luck to be at a party full of them. Maybe some can be monkey-clever, some of the time, but they aren't hardly ever smart.

It is music that speaks to the deepest reaches of your soul, and you are lifted higher, ever higher, by the adagio, in my opinion more so even than in any of the masses that Beethoven composed.

We never had books in the house. Not any book in our house. Not a Bible, not anything. So, I would go the library from a very young age and get the books out.