The Atlantic really gave me my writing career - even just the conviction to be a writer.

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.

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

It’s better to not have a reputation than a bad one.

Whatever story you're telling in Louisiana, the landscape is going to become a character in it.

I was raised by television. It was my first cultural window. It was a constant companion.

As human beings, we are nothing but the stories we live and die by — so you’d better be careful what stories you tell yourself.