If you're Stephen King and you have a massive body of huge-selling well-respected work, you can pivot and do whatever you want. I don't have that body of work, I don't have that audience that's comfortable with me enough yet to follow my bliss with me.

I leave you, hoping that the lamp of liberty will burn in your bosoms until there shall no longer be a doubt that all mean are created free and equal.

Surely life has taught you that a thing can be both beautiful and vile.

I've been a lifelong horror fan, but at the same time, I would say 90 percent of my reading is biographies and nonfiction history.

Some people say "if we split up,we can cover more ground"-with blood

Of all the weapons in the world, love is the most dangerous.

Sometimes we see the Civil War in movies and imagine these neatly aligned rows of men with muskets, walking in line to shoot each other. In reality the things that fascinated me were how absolutely ruthless and violent so many engagements were, how much suffering and how men were not prepared.