But now the joy is gone and the sadness is back, the sadness feels like something deserved, the price of some not-quite-forgotten betrayal.

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

The scariest moment is always just before you start.

He didn’t know if that was really true or not, but he discovered something which was tremendously liberating: he didn’t care. He was very tired of thinking and thinking and still not knowing. He was also tired of being frightened, like a man who has entered a cave on a lark and now begins to suspect he is lost. Stop thinking about it, then. That’s the solution.

I just write about what I feel I want to write about. I'm like a kid. I get an idea, and it's like a kid's toy that you push and tug around the room. It's fun, it's bright, it's pretty and maybe it'll go clack-clack or whiz-whiz, whatever it happens to do. I like to make believe.

Nightmares exist outside of logic, and there's little fun to be had in explanations; they're antithetical to the poetry of fear.

Good description is a learned skill, one of the prime reasons why you cannot succeed unless you read a lot and write a lot. It’s not just a question of how-to, you see; it’s also a question of how much to. Reading will help you answer how much, and only reams of writing will help you with the how. You can learn only by doing.