Sometimes there is no darker place than our thoughts, the moonless midnight of the mind.

Darkness dwells within even the best of us. In the worst of us, darkness not only dwells but reigns.

I enjoy the hell out of writing but don't like what follows: promotion and publicity, which I always strive to keep to a minimum, sometimes to my publisher's dismay.

Loss is the hardest thing, I said. But it's also the teacher that's the most difficult to ignore.

Most people tend to think the best of those who are blessed with beauty; we have difficulty imagining that physical perfection can conceal twisted emotions or a damaged mind.

You can't always win arguments as a writer, but you have to just go ahead and say, well, I'm doing it that way anyway.

I kind of build a novel the way marine polyps build a coral reef, it's millions and millions of little precarious bodies stacked on one another. And in my case, that's thousands of minutes I go through to get from one scene to the next and build it that way.