never's the word God listens for when he needs a laugh.

Writing is like a little hole in reality that you can go through and you can get out and you can be someplace else for a while.

Some part of me knew from the first that what I wanted was not reality but myth.

I think it's relatively easy for people to accept something like telepathy or precognition or teleplasm because their willingness to believe doesn't cost them anything. It doesn't keep them awake nights. But the idea that the evil that men do lives after them is unsettling.

The real importance of reading is that it creates an ease & intimacy with the process of writing... It also offers you a constantly growing knowledge of what has been done and what hasn't, what is trite and what is fresh, what works and what lies there dying (or dead) on the page. The more you read, the less apt you are to make a fool of yourself with your pen or word processor.

I want to write about spiders. To me, this is the one theme that cuts right across and scares just about everybody. Spiders, to me, are just about the most horrible, awful things that I can think about. I think everyone is afraid of spiders.

Poe was the first writer to write about main characters who were bad guys or who were mad guys, and those are some of my favorite stories.