“My voice dropped when I was 14. And when I was 14, I might have weighed 75 pounds. So you can imagine how strange that must have been: like James Earl Jones speaking through a sock puppet.”

I can describe at length every feature on the character, though I might only supply a glimpse of this on the page. So if I’m writing color into that I’m also writing texture, I’m pushing the image more than anything else.

The High Divide, a novel about a family in peril, is haunting and tense but leavened by considerable warmth and humanity. Lin Enger writes with durable grace about a man’s quest for redemption and the human capacity for forgiveness.

I grew up with guns. For my 16th birthday, in fact, I received a .357 instead of a car. But there was nothing playful about them; they were tools.

You can’t teach talent, but you can teach people how to read strenuously and mimic the moves of rock-star writers so that they eventually accumulate a toolbox of skills.

I grew up on genre – on Westerns, spy thrillers, sci-fi, fantasy novels, horror novels. Especially horror novels.

Writing is an act of empathy. You are occupying and understanding a point of view that might be alien to your own–and work is often the keyhole through which you peer.

I have a scenario but almost always it’s entwined with at least one person to begin with. Then I sort of expand from there and I’m thinking about books novels.

I want to build as many worlds as possible – each a version of ours with a crack running through it – and not be anchored to any of them.

People talk about me as masculine. Because of the way I walk and talk and crank out pull-ups and smell like bacon.

I wanted it to be as multi-windowed as possible, so that the reader felt like they were seeing all the different ways in to a big haunted house.

And then once I figure out who they are I can figure out what they want and once I figure out what they want I’m able to put obstacles in the way of that desire, and that’s where plot springs from.

I think my leap into TV and movies and comics is in a way natural because I’m a visual storyteller. If you look at any one of my short stories or novels, they sort of unscroll cinematically.

The only element of it that concerned him was how it might impact him personally.

We’ve also always hoped that there might be a way to avoid dying.

I’m not afraid of anything that might happen to me on this earth, because I know no matter what, nothing can take my spirit from me.

For all the things I’m losing I might aswell resign myself to try and make a change.

If we had been there listening, we still might not have been able to determine exactly what Stanton said. All we know for sure is that everyone was weeping, and the room was full.

I understood that I might fail, but I wouldn’t let it happen because I changed my compass along the way.

The past is so often unknowable not because it is befogged now but because it was befogged then, too, back when it was still the present.

And in a world without heroes, as the movie trailer voice-over guy might say, the slightly awkward can be slightly cool.