Look at your body— A painted puppet, a poor toy Of jointed parts ready to collapse, A diseased and suffering thing With a head full of false imaginings. —The Dhammapada

It has always seemed to me that my existence consisted purely and exclusively of nothing but the most outrageous nonsense.

No one gives up on something until it turns on them, whether or not that thing is real or unreal.

What we do, as a conscious species, is set markers for ourselves. Once we reach one marker, we advance to the next.

The finest people, as people go, cannot help but betray a fair portion of fear and insecurity, even full-blown panic.

The ‘experimental’ writer, then, is simply following the story’s commands to the best of his human ability. The writer is not the story, the story is the story. See? Sometimes this is very hard to accept and sometimes too easy. On the one hand, there’s the writer who can’t face his fate: that the telling of a story has nothing at all to do with him; on the other hand, there’s the one who faces it too well: that the telling of the story has nothing at all to do with him

Best-selling horror fiction is indeed necessarily conservative because it must entertain a large number of readers. It’s like network television. I’m your local cable access station.