The work is where I tend to feel pressure - not so much in the reaction to it.

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.

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.

We live in a culture that has a real hard time distinguishing fiction from reality. Even when they're told something is fiction.

I've found that all weak people share a basic obsession - they fixate on the idea of satisfaction. Anywhere you go men and women are like crows drawn by shiny objects. For some folks, the shiny objects are other people, and you'd be better off developing a drug habit.

If landscape is a character for me, then it helps if I'm familiar with it and I already have a take on it.