I have always felt a little bit uncomfortable with question [why I'm write these stories]. It's not a question that you would ask a guy that writes detective stories or the guy that writes mystery stories, or westerns, or whatever. But it is asked of the writer of horror stories because it seems that there is something nasty about our love for horror stories, or boogies, ghosts and goblins, demons and devils.

sure, we need the gypsies. we always have. because if you don't have someone to run out of town once in a while, how are you going to know you yourself belong there?

God and the afterlife and all that is certainly a subject that's interested me, and I think it interests me more the older that I get.

Put an egg in your shoe and beat it, make like a tree and leave, imitate an amoeba and split.

The crazy people of the world...shouldn't get to win. If God won't make it better after they do have their shitty little victories, then ordinary people have to. They have to try, at least.

I hope you liked them, Reader; that they did for you what any good story should do--make you forget the real stuff weighing on your mind for a little while and take you away to a place you've never been. It's the most amiable sort of magic I know.

I start work around 8 a.m. and usually finish around noon. If there's more to do, I do it in the late afternoon, although that isn't prime time for me.