Do you know how cruel your God can be, David. How fantastically cruel?...Sometimes he makes us live.

When the reader hears strong echoes of his or her own life and beliefs, he or she is apt to become more invested in the story.

My books depend on someone in danger, putting pieces together and figuring things out. They do a lot of thinking, and that gets lost in the movie.

Even the company of the mad was better than the company of the dead.

Words create sentences; sentences create paragraphs; sometimes paragraphs quicken and begin to breathe.

Life's simplest answers are often the easiest to overlook.

A short story is like a kiss in the dark.