I find the constraints of drama actually freeing: It brings everything down to character and action.

Some people, no matter where they look, they see themselves.

I find the constraints of drama actually freeing: It brings everything down to character and action.

The ideas within this philosophy are certainly not exclusive to any writer.

Killing characters on television has become an easy short cut to cathartic emotion.

And if we’re talking about hard-boiled detectives, too, what could be more hardboiled than the worldview of Ligotti or Cioran? They make the grittiest of crime writers seem like dilettantes. Next to The Conspiracy Against the Human Race, Mickey Spillane seems about as hard-boiled as bubble gum.

My ultimare goal is, without illusion and without sentimentality, merely by telling the truth as I see it, to break your heart. If I can break your heart and cause your awareness to expand to include another person's experience, even a fictional person's experience, and to inhabit for a moment their sorrow and suffering, then I think it expands us as people.