I think the best stories always end up being about the people rather than the event, which is to say character-driven.

People think that I must be a very strange person. This is not correct. I have the heart of a small boy. It is in a glass jar on my desk.

They had become a fixed star in the shifting firmament of the high school's relationships, the acknowledged Romeo and Juliet. And she knew with sudden hatefulness that there was one couple like them in every white suburban high school in America.

If you don't have the time to read, you don't have the time or the tools to write.

What Jack didn't understand was that no matter where he went, the same asshole got off the plane.

I try to create sympathy for my characters, then turn the monsters loose.

I love the movies, and when I go to see a movie that's been made from one of my books, I know that it isn't going to be exactly like my novel because a lot of other people have interpreted it. But I also know it has an idea that I'll like because that idea occurred to me, and I spent a year, or a year and a half of my life working on it.