Do any men grow up or do they only come of age?

Symbolism exists to adorn and enrich, not to create an artificial sense of profundity.

‎If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot…reading is the creative center of a writer’s life…you cannot hope to sweep someone else away by the force of your writing until it has been done to you.

I think the best writers are voracious readers who pick up the cadences and the feel of narration through a number of different books. And you begin by maybe copying the style of writers that really knocked you out.

Superhero movies and comic books teach a lesson that runs directly counter to the culture-of-violence idea: guns are for bad guys too cowardly to fight like men.

Pray for rain all you like, but dig a well as you do it.

There's two kinds of evil that horror fiction always deals with. One kind is the sort of evil that comes from inside people, like in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The other kind of evil is predestined evil. It falls on you like a stroke of lightning. That's the scary stuff, but, in a way, it's the stuff you don't have to worry about. I gotta worry whether or not I'm getting cavities. I gotta worry about whether cigarettes are giving me cancer. Those are things I can change. Don't give me lightning out of a clear sky. If that hits me I just say, "That's probably the way God meant it to be."