“The Revelation was my master’s project, and after I finished it, I thought I’d send it off to a publisher and within a year or so be a rich and famous writer.”

Hope was a dangerous emotion that more often than not led men into foolishness and peril, made them risk their lives and lose their wives and part with fortunes that they never recovered.

Life is short. Eternity is long.

I would waste countless hours looking up things about myself, writing fake posts about how great I am and arguing with people who don’t like my work. It saves me a lot of time and frustration to just stay out of the loop.

Real life was messier than fiction, and in it you didn’t always have time to do or say the right things.

I write horror because I enjoy it. I’m endlessly fascinated by the supernatural, by death, by darkness. And, to be honest, I don’t have much choice. This is the way my mind works.

Horror writers can write about everything in the real world that a mainstream novelist can–plus the supernatural, which is the most fertile field for metaphor imaginable.

I think the internet is a great marketing tool–but marketing is not my job. I’m a writer. My job is to write novels.

In real life, good people die all the time and a**holes can live long and happy lives. It’s a crapshoot.

Murder is an inherently evil act, no matter what the circumstances, no matter how convincing the rationalizations.

I write horror. And if no one wants to buy my books, I’ll just keep writing them until they do sell–and get a job at Taco Bell in the meantime.

It helps readers identify with their problems. It also helps ground the supernatural events that follow in a recognizable reality and perhaps gives some of my wilder scenarios a little verisimilitude.

As far as I’m concerned, those wussboys should sever all ties with the horror community if that’s the way they feel and get out of the way so real horror writers can do their work.

I write what I want to write. Period. I don’t write novels-for-hire using media tie-in characters, I don’t write suspense novels or thrillers.

I think readers appreciate those of us who stay in the trenches and fight the good fight even when times get tough.

Hell, look at the Bible: gods, devils, ghosts, witches, giants, resurrections. That’s one big horror story. And it’s the most popular book on the planet.

Two years later I finally sold it. For a whopping $4,000. A year after that, it finally came out. Which explains why there are all those terrible jobs on my resume!

It is safe to say that the U.S. Congress is now run by paid staffers, not by people elected to do the job.

The psychological trauma of losing a job can be as great as the trauma of a divorce. It creates a lot of anger and emotional hardship. People may become quite depressed.

no job, no matter how lowly, is truly ‘unskilled.

I learned to produce whether I wanted to or not. It would be easy to say oh, I have writer’s block, oh, I have to wait for my muse. I don’t. Chain that muse to your desk and get the job done.

The job of the screenplay is to identify and extract the essence of the story from the novel and reconfigure it for the screen, maintaining its essence in a different vehicle.

If you’re happy, you eat. If you’re sad, you eat. You lose a job, you eat. You get a job, you eat. It’s, you know, it’s addiction.

I did everything in my power to give my brokers brand identity and clout in the market. I saw my job as parent to build them up and if I took care of them, then they would take care of their customer.

By the time I got to Harvard, I feel like I knew who I was, and my job there was to throw as much against the wall as possible, to see what would stick.