Wherever you write is supposed to be a little bit of a refuge, a place where you can get away from the world. The more closed in you are, the more you're forced back on your own imagination.

When you write you tell yourself a story. When you rewrite you take out everything that is NOT the story.

No one ever really pays for betrayal in silver....The price of any betrayal always comes due in flesh.

Most gothics are overplotted novels whose success or failure hinges on the author's ability to make you believe in the characters and partake of the mood.

Now panic beats and flutters inside my skull like a flock of starlings locked in an attic.

Some of this book—perhaps too much—has been about how I learned to do it. Much of it has been about how you can do it better. The rest of it—and perhaps the best of it—is a permission slip: you can, you should, and if you're brave enough to start, you will. Writing is magic, as much the water of life as any other creative art. The water is free. So drink. Drink and be filled up.

American grammar doesn't have the sturdiness of British grammar, but it has its own scruffy charm.