I have an idea of how the book will finish up, but it very rarely finishes up the way that I think it's going to.

I wasn't a social drinker. I used to say that I didn't want to go to bars because they were full of assholes like me.

The rope by which the great blocks of taxes are attached to any citizenry is simple loyalty.

By writing a horror novel where this inexplicable disorder takes over in our ordered lives, you make order look better by comparison. But below that, there's a part of us that responds to the Who bashing their instruments to pieces on the stage. There's a very primitive part that says, "Do it some more."

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.

This was the Darker Life, where every truth was written backward.

She can't help it,' he said. 'She's got the soul of a poet and the emotional makeup of a junkyard dog.