I love crime, I love mysteries, and I love ghosts.

I think of fear as a survival function, and in the stories that I write, the only thing that I've tried to do is provide people with nightmares which are really safe places to put those fears for a while because you can say afterwards that uh, that, that well it was all just make-believe anyway, so I just took my emotions for a walk.

We never know which lives we influence, or when, or why.

Life was such a wheel that no man could stand upon it for long. And it always, at the end, came round to the same place again.

Your job isn't to find these ideas but to recognize them when they show up.

I am, when you stop to think of it, a member of a fairly select group: the final handful of American novelists who learned to read and write before they learned to eat a daily helping of video bullshit.

Bloom never pissed me off because there are critics out there, and he's one of them, who take their ignorance about popular culture as a badge of intellectual prowess.