 Civilization rests on the fact that most people do the right thing most of the time. |
| Literary fiction, as a strict genre, is all but dead. Meanwhile, most genres flourish. |
| I think it's the people who have no doubt that every word they put down is gold that probably don't write very well. |
| I have been reading Stephen King since CARRIE and hope to read him for many years to come. |
| Although I've said a million times that I'm not a horror writer, I do like horror. |
| If you have to pay the bills, and you write something you're not proud of, use a pen-name for that. |
| In my books, I never portray violence as a reasonable solution to a problem. If the lead characters in the story are driven to it, it's at the extreme end of their experience. |
| Nothing gives us courage more readily than the desire to avoid looking like a damn fool. |
| I receive about 10,000 letters a year from readers, and in the first year after a book is published, perhaps 5,000 letters will deal specifically with that piece of work. |
| When I'm working on a novel, I work 70-hour weeks. |
| Every book has some real life in it. I was never pursued by an evil twin clone, but everything else in MR. MURDER was pretty much out of my own life. |
| A politician's goal is always to manipulate public debate. I think there are some politicians with higher goals. But all of them get corrupted by power. |
| I think the world is full of evil people. I think in some ways we're in more danger now than before. |
| If something in your writing gives support to people in their lives, that's more than just entertainment-which is what we writers all struggle to do, to touch people. |
| I've got a long list of books I wish I'd never written-and I've kept them all out of print for the past 20 years. |
| Books were this wonderful escape for me because I could open a book and disappear into it, and that was the only way out of that house when I was a kid. |
| There's sometimes a weird benefit to having an alcoholic, violent father. He really motivated me in that I never wanted to be anything like him. |
| I try not to spend too much time on partisan politics. Life's too short for that. I don't really believe that there have been many human problems solved by politics. |
| When tempest tossed, embrace chaos. |
| In my personal life, I'm a comic novel. But then, so are we all, because we're human beings. |
