In polite society, we call our obsessions hobbies.

Why don't we all just go crazy when we know were going to croak? Because the mind's a monkey. You put things in departments and you go ahead. You go on and plan for the future and assume that the future's going to work out okay. Yet we know that sooner or later we're all going to be eating worms, whether it's fifty years or sixty. It might be tomorrow. It might happen today.

You have to stay faithful to what you're working on.

There's a Mr. Hyde for every happy Jekyll face, a dark face on the other side of the mirror.

Too often, in novels that are speculative, God is a kind of kryptonite, and that's about all that it is, and it goes back to Dracula, where someone dumps a crucifix in Count Dracula's face, and he pulls away and runs back into his house. That's not religion. That's some kind of juju, like a talisman.

Sometimes human places, create inhuman monsters.

The more fiction you read and write, the more you'll find your paragraphs forming on their own.