Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I like creating villains.
Writing is a job: you must show up.
I was very much a child of the Cold War.
I was a 'Planet of the Apes'-obsessed kid.
Behind every writer stands a very large bookshelf.
The world was a world of dreaming souls who could not die.
Even on the darkest night, my friend, life will have its way.
I like to break left when people think I'm going to go right.
This ravishing world. This achingly bittersweet, ravishing world.
What strange places our lives can carry us to, what dark passages.
The military was all about hierarchies, who urinated highest on the hydrant
It's different being afraid when there's the hope it will amount to something.
It happened fast. Thirty-two minutes for one world to die, another to be born.
Writers who pretend that everything they're doing is completely new are full of it.
You learn to write by reading, and my experiences and tastes as a reader are pretty wide.
Choosing writing as a career, just by itself, is a measure of not being a calculating person.
The sadness you feel is not your own. It's his sadness you feel in your heart, Amy, for missing you.
And I grew up on a steady diet of science fiction, especially apocalyptic and postapocalyptic fiction.
We live, we die. Somewhere along the way, if we're lucky, we may find someone to help lighten the load.
Because that's what heaven is...it's opening the door of a house in twilight and everyone you love is there.
So, whenever I'm writing, I'm writing in the presence of all the other books I've read and I think we all are.
And I had always liked vampire stories because they are great material that can be refashioned in lots of ways.
My inventing time is all done under the influence of aerobic exercise. Basically, I do all my thinking while I run.
If you are writing any book about the end of the world, what you are really writing about is what's worth saving about it.
One of the great themes in American literature is the individual's confrontation with the vast open spaces of the continent.
The fact is, there's a great deal of hair-splitting fussiness when it comes to fly-fishing, most of it as silly as a top hat.
As long as we remember a person, they're not really gone. Their thoughts, their feelings, their memories, they become a part of us.
If asked to name the worst moment of his life, Michael Fisher wouldn't have hesitated to give his answer: it was when the lights went out.
I have any number of completely dark obsessions and fascinations, and none of this was present in my profile or my growing profile as a writer.
My rule has always been, write the next part of the book that you seem to know well. So I won't necessarily write chapter two after chapter one.
Real courage is doing the right thing when nobody's looking. Doing the unpopular thing because it's what you believe, and the heck with everybody.
I think many years ago I got on a bus in L.A. and drove around to see the stars' homes, but that's the extent of my direct experience in Hollywood.
I'm an ecumenical reader, grew up with all sorts of fiction, teach writing, went to the Iowa Writers' Workshop, so my tastes and interests are broad.
It had never occurred to her that God would cry, but of course that was wrong. God would be crying all the time. He would cry and cry and never stop.
Vampires have always been hot. They are one of our most durable monsters. It's one of those stories that galvanizes us early and it's always going on.
The future that I will not live to see is the one my children will live in. That's my immortality. And I shouldn't try to mortgage theirs for my benefit.
I saw my one purpose in that moment, looking into that little girls eyes. I was the one who was meant to save her, that was my one purpose all this time.
Every book has got its challenges. You run into a plot point that you can't figure out, or a scene that you struggle to write and have to write 50 times.
My theory of characterization is basically this: Put some dirt on a hero, and put some sunshine on the villain, one brush stroke of beauty on the villain.
I came to Houston for a job, the reason most people move halfway across the country with a first grader and a five-week-old. I came here to teach at Rice.
Miles away from everthing and everyone I've ever known or loved. I feel as if I've entered a new era of my life. What strange places our lives carry us to.
It was what you did, Wolgast understood; you started to tell a story about who you were, and soon enough the lies were all you had and you became that person.
So perhaps the greatest worry of all was that one day you would realize that all the worries of your life amounted to one thing: the desire to just stop worrying.
He breathed once more, holding the air in his chest, as if it were not air but something more--a sweet taste of freedom, of all cares lifted, everything over and done.
And indeed, I am a warmhearted and thoroughly domestic man who gets up and makes pancakes for his children and kisses them on the head when he sends them off to their day.
I grew up during the Cold War, when everything seemed very tenuous. For many years, right up until the fall of the Berlin Wall, I had vivid nightmares of nuclear apocalypse.
I'm still an English professor at Rice University here in Houston. They've been very generous in letting me on a very long leash to just work on 'The Passage' and its sequels.
There's an outline for each of the books that I adhere to pretty closely, but I'm not averse to taking it in a new direction, as long as I can get it back to where I need it to go.
One of the things I constantly think about as a writer is the way in which people are full of contradictions - there's all this contradictory information inside a human personality.
Kittredge had obviously misjudged her, but he had learned that was the way with most people. The story was never the story, and it surprised you, how much another person could carry.