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.

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

I don't think you can create effectively toward expectation. I'm not in the service business.

I was raised in a heavily Catholic family. Early and consistent encounters with mysticism.

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.

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.