A child blind from birth doesn't even know he's blind until someone tells him. Even then he has only the most academic idea of what blindness is; only the formerly sighted have a real grip on the thing. Ben Hanscom had no sense of being lonely because he had never been anything but. If the condition had been new, or more localized, he might have understood, but loneliness both encompassed his life and overreached it.

I wanted to write a balls-to-the-wall supernatural horror story, something I haven't done in a long time.

The beauty of religious mania is that it has the power to explain everything. Once God (or Satan) is accepted as the first cause of everything which happens in the mortal world, nothing is left to chance...logic can be happily tossed out the window.

It is fairly clear that many of the arguments against proposition testing are really arguments against propositions themselves.

Kids know they can't make it alone, yet at the same time, built into each one of us, is a survival ethic. It says, "Nobody cares and you have to look out for yourself and if you don't, you'll die." These two things work against each other. I think most kids are very frightened of their parents, and that's what all fairy tales reflect: Parents will fail you and you'll be left on your own. But, of course, everything comes out right in the end and the parents take you back.

I am religious in the sense that I believe in God and I believe that there is an abiding logical spirit that controls what goes on to a certain extent.

Ninety-five percent of people who walk the earth are simply inert. One percent are saints, and one percent are assholes. The other three percent are people who do what they say they can do.