When asked, "How do you write?" I invariably answer, "one word at a time."

People want to know why I do this, why I write such gross stuff. I like to tell them I have the heart of a small boy... and I keep it in a jar on my desk.

Get busy living, or get busy dying.

You can't deny laughter; when it comes, it plops down in your favorite chair and stays as long as it wants.

When asked, "How do you write?" I invariably answer, "one word at a time."

Talent in cheaper than table salt. What separates the talented individual from the successful one is a lot of hard work.

When his life was ruined, his family killed, his farm destroyed, Job knelt down on the ground and yelled up to the heavens, "Why god? Why me?" and the thundering voice of God answered, "There's just something about you that pisses me off."

We make up horrors to help us cope with the real ones.

He had a massive stroke. He died with his tie on. Do you think that could be our generation's equivalent of that old saying about dying with your boots on?

It's better to be good than evil, but one achieves goodness at a terrific cost.

Only enemies speak the truth; friends and lovers lie endlessly, caught in the web of duty.

No, it's not a very good story - its author was too busy listening to other voices to listen as closely as he should have to the one coming from inside.

I watched Titanic when I got back home from the hospital, and cried. I knew that my IQ had been damaged.

The place where you made your stand never mattered. Only that you were there... and still on your feet.

Fiction is the truth inside the lie.

The most important things are the hardest things to say. They are the things you get ashamed of because words diminish your feelings - words shrink things that seem timeless when they are in your head to no more than living size when they are brought out.

The trust of the innocent is the liar's most useful tool.

The devil's voice is sweet to hear.

I guess when you turn off the main road, you have to be prepared to see some funny houses.

God is cruel. Sometimes he makes you live.

Each life makes its own immitation of immortality.

I am the literary equivalent of a Big Mac and Fries.

French is the language that turns dirt into romance.

A lot of us grow up and we grow out of the literal interpretation that we get when we're children, but we bear the scars all our life. Whether they're scars of beauty or scars of ugliness, it's pretty much in the eye of the beholder.

And in real life endings aren't always neat, whether they're happy endings, or whether they're sad endings.

And poets, in my view, and I think the view of most people, do speak God's language - it's better, it's finer, it's language on a higher plane than ordinary people speak in their daily lives.

But I think talent as a writer is hard-wired in, it's all there, at least the basic elements of it. You can't change it any more than you can choose whether to be right handed or left handed.

Every book you pick up has its own lesson or lessons, and quite often the bad books have more to teach than the good ones.

I am the literary equivalent of a Big Mac and fries.

I can remember being home from school with tonsillitis and writing stories in bed to pass the time.

I had a period where I thought I might not be good enough to publish.

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

I love the movies, and when I go to see a movie that's been made from one of my books, I know that it isn't going to be exactly like my novel because a lot of other people have interpreted it. But I also know it has an idea that I'll like because that idea occurred to me, and I spent a year, or a year and a half of my life working on it.

I never saw any of my dad's stories. My mother said he had piles and piles of manuscripts.

I recognize terror as the finest emotion and so I will try to terrorize the reader. But if I find that I cannot terrify, I will try to horrify, and if I find that I cannot horrify, I'll go for the gross-out. I'm not proud.

I think there ought to be some serious discussion by smart people, really smart people, about whether or not proliferation of things like The Smoking Gun and TMZ and YouTube and the whole celebrity culture is healthy.

I'm not a big fan of psychoanalysis: I think if you have mental problems what you need are good pills. But I do think that if you have thinks that bother you, things that are unresolved, the more that you talk about them, write about them, the less serious they become.

I've always believed in God. I also think that's the sort of thing that either comes as part of the equipment, the capacity to believe, or at some point in your life, when you're in a position where you actually need help from a power greater than yourself, you simply make an agreement.

If you don't have the time to read, you don't have the time or the tools to write.

If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot. There's no way around these two things that I'm aware of, no shortcut.

In small towns people scent the wind with noses of uncommon keenness.

Life is like a wheel. Sooner or later, it always come around to where you started again.

Like anything else that happens on its own, the act of writing is beyond currency. Money is great stuff to have, but when it comes to the act of creation, the best thing is not to think of money too much. It constipates the whole process.

Monsters are real, and ghosts are real too. They live inside us, and sometimes, they win.

People think that I must be a very strange person. This is not correct. I have the heart of a small boy. It is in a glass jar on my desk.

Talent is cheaper than table salt. What separates the talented individual from the successful one is a lot of hard work.

This is not a bad life.

We like to think about how smart we are. But I think talent as a writer is hard-wired in, it's all there, at least the basic elements of it. You can't change it any more than you can choose whether to be right handed or left handed.

We're news junkies in my house.