You learn to write by reading, and my experiences and tastes as a reader are pretty wide.

My theory of characterization is basically this: Put some dirt on a hero, and put some sunshine on the villain, one brush stroke of beauty on the villain.

So perhaps the greatest worry of all was that one day you would realize that all the worries of your life amounted to one thing: the desire to just stop worrying.

It was possible, he understood, for a person's life to become just a long series of mistakes, and that the end, when it came, was just one more mistake in a chain of bad choices. The thing was, most of these mistakes were actually borrowed from other people. You took their bad ideas, and for whatever reason, made them your own.

What strange places our lives can carry us to, what dark passages.

Because that's what heaven is...it's opening the door of a house in twilight and everyone you love is there.

I have any number of completely dark obsessions and fascinations, and none of this was present in my profile or my growing profile as a writer.