My feeling of the whole genre, of the terror tale, is this: The best thing that you can do for the readers in this field is to terrify them. It is something that is intellectual, it happens in your mind.

Anything with the power to make you laugh over thirty years later isn’t a waste of time. I think something like that is very close to immortality.

You can approach the act of writing with nervousness, excitement, hopefulness, or despair ... Come to it any way but lightly.

And as a writer, one of the things that I've always been interested in doing is actually invading your comfort space. Because that's what we're supposed to do. Get under your skin, and make you react.

When you're five and you hurt, you make a big noise in the world. At ten you whimper. But by the time you make fifteen you begin to eat the poisoned apples that grow on your own inner tree of pain.

There is no Idea Dump, no Story Central, no Island of the Buried Bestsellers; good stories seem to come quite literally from nowhere, sailing at you right out of the empty sky.

I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was 12 - Jesus, did you?