All fiction is a process of imagining: whatever you write, in whatever genre or medium, your task is to make things up convincingly and interestingly and new.

With pornography, if you don't get hard or wet, depending on your gender, it didn't work. With humour, if you don't laugh it didn't work. And with horror, if you don't get scared or haunted, depending on what it's trying to do, it didn't work. I'm fascinated by those three categories.

He tried to listen to the conversations going on at the table and he found that he could no longer concentrate on what anyone was saying and which was worse that he was not interested in any of what he was able to hear.

But standing in that hallway, it was all coming back to me. Memories were waiting at the edges of things, beckoning to me.

Put one word after another. Find the right word, put it down.

I hope you will have a wonderful year, that you'll dream dangerously and outrageously, that you'll make something that didn't exist before you made it, that you will be loved and that you will be liked, and that you will have people to love and to like in return. And, most importantly (because I think there should be more kindness and more wisdom in the world right now), that you will, when you need to be, be wise, and that you will always be kind.

He left the drapes open, watched the lights of the cars and of the fast food joints through the window glass, comforted to know there was another world out there, one he could walk to anytime he wanted.