Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
The poor aren't defeated. We're domesticated.
The best writing deadlines are poverty and death.
I spend lots of time on the Web, some of it even useful.
Empathy is what separates human beings from teenage boys.
Every era needs a genre through which it understands itself.
My three obsessions are mental illness, horror and religion.
Try imagining James Joyce not writing about being a Catholic.
Nearly everyone could be undone by an old woman's displeasure.
Lonely women destroy themselves; lonely men threaten the world.
Doubt is the big machine. It grinds up the delusions of women and men.
In fiction, it's a big challenge to keep the reader in one place for so long.
I'd read at a much higher-than-average grade level since, well, grade school.
People who move to New York always the same mistake. They can't see the place.
Fear warps our understanding of reality and even our ability to see reality clearly.
In the end, what's any good reader really hoping for? That spark. That spell. That journey.
When I find the right information, the Web is a blessing; when I don't, it's a distraction.
It's tough to write beautifully about ugly things, but Mitchell S. Jackson makes it look easy.
A little style is a good thing, but you can’t trust a person who won’t be ugly in front of you.
I have my teachers who tell me what to do. I'm not quite old enough yet to be truly independent.
I know that many authors say editors don't edit anymore, but that's not been true in my experience.
The best monsters are our anxieties given form. They make sense on the level of a dream - or a nightmare.
People use the notion of God to bully people and hurt people, when we can use the concept to respect and uplift.
The devil that stayed with me most vividly was the one from the cover of Iron Maiden's 'Number of the Beast' album.
You can't write a story about a mental hospital in the United States without facing the grand example of 'Cuckoo's Nest.'
I wanted to write a story set in the Lovecraftian universe that didn't gloss over the uglier implications of his worldview.
I had a pretty bad time when I was an undergraduate at Cornell University. I failed out of school. I was much, much heavier.
Since Queens is the most ethnically diverse plot of land on Earth, we had tenants from all over the globe. The whole world in one building.
I've spent my life visiting a handful of people who are very close to me when they've been committed to one hospital or another in New York.
No matter where you go, poor people have the capacity to endure. Some people even compliment us on it, as if endurance is all we can achieve.
I weighed 25 stone, and I didn't stand nine feet tall, so the weight didn't sit well on me. As big as a house? No. I was as big as an estate.
Lumpy and lazy; I aspired to lethargy. In the second year of university, I missed half my classes just because I couldn't pull myself out of bed.
The horror genre is vast and full of brilliance. Stephen King, Shirley Jackson, Herman Melville, the book of Esther. I'll happily join that list.
The journalistic endeavor - at least theoretically - is grounded in objectivity. The goal is to get you to understand what happened, when and to whom.
'Dark Gods,' T. E. D. Klein's book of four novellas, felt like a godsend - even if it came from a deformed god, one that lurked beneath our sidewalks.
I'm a big fan of monsters. Number one, they're fun, and two, they're such great ways to access the subconscious fears and beliefs of any group of people.
I hadn't stopped fearing the chance of passing on an illness, but that fear had become balanced by the observation that being ill wasn't the same as being beaten.
There are really only two ways to react to the extraordinary. The first is to ponder the grand purpose until all the fun is sucked away, the second is to enjoy it.
There's the wonder of being able to do research from your own living room, of course. I do find that my biggest research issue, though, is how to frame my questions.
As a 13-year-old fan of horror fiction, I hadn't seen too many cities in the literature I loved. It was always small towns, or backwoods locales, or maybe the suburbs.
Bram Stoker's 'Dracula' was a story about the fear of immigration; the bad old bloodsucker swooping in from Eastern Europe and also preying upon 'our' vulnerable women.
If you want to learn the true nature of a child you have to watch how she plays. If you want to learn the true nature of an adult you have to watch how she does her job.
Education is gathering information and reading... No human being can thrive without some form of education. How you get it is up to you - the important thing is that you get it.
I’m always looking for the monster. Not even just in horror. I want them in everything. Just give me the monsters. Logical conclusions don’t satisfy. Monsters satisfy, absolutely.
One of the reasons I love devils so much is not based in my faith, but because as a kid, I grew up loving heavy metal and horror movies, and the devil is such a huge presence in both.
Clothes are a kind of uniform. A nun's habit, a surgeon's scrubs, a cop's uniform. People often say that when they put on a certain uniform, they actually think of themselves differently.
Miniature golf, like billiards, is a game of angles. And, like billiards, most of the fun is in pretending you know what the hell you're doing. The worse you do, the more you have to laugh.
The project of Ralph Ellison's 'Invisible Man' is exactly that: to assert the beautiful, bountiful, chaotic complexity of one black American male. And, by extension, all black American males.
When I finished graduate school, I had a master's of fine arts from a prestigious institution, a manuscript that would eventually become my first published book - and almost no marketable skills.
What's beautiful about Godzilla is, of course, it's in every way a symbol of Japan dealing with the aftermath of the atomic bombs being dropped on them, and their ideas of how they're affected by it.
I couldn't get a date, but I couldn't be quite sure how unattractive I'd become. I was still friendly; I made jokes, and in my mind, if I saw a woman smiling at me... I still had a chance. I did not.