I think pressure can be an incentive toward improvement, and while I'm not denying that I feel some, I will also stress that it is self-inflicted and hopefully can be channeled in a healthy way.

We understand tornadoes scientifically, but it still feels supernatural. The randomness makes it feel supernatural.

You have only so many chances to tell stories. I didn't want to be forever wedded to one form of storytelling when there are so many out there.

I started writing as soon as I started reading.

What I love is the writing, it's not having written. I like the process of it.

You should be writing for the love of the story, and when it comes time to return to the manuscript, everything else belongs behind a closed door.

I think anyone who writes suspense fiction and says that King isn't an influence is either lying or being foolish.

Band of Skulls is joining Cage the Elephant as my new musical caffeine.

Horror and supernatural novels give you a lot of what you look for in a crime novel, just with a twist that was very fresh for me as a reader.

He stood at the edge of town feeling very small, powerless. Night in the mountains could do that to you, reminding you of your place in the world and laughing at any sense of self-importance.

But at least it made one realize that life still held infinite possibilities for change.

It was pride that changed angels into devils

Saving life and avoiding death are typically shorthand for far less evocative terms: lengthening life and delaying death.

Secure property in hand leads to peace in mind.

I'm fond of kissing. It's part of my job. God sent me down to kiss a lot of people.

It's hard to bullshit the ocean. It's not listening, you know what I mean.

I was not influenced by composers as much as by natural objects and physical phenomena.

You can't understand Twenty-first-Century Politics with an Eighteenth-Century Brain.

We must not take the faults of our youth with us into old age, for age brings along its own defects.

Friends are the flowers in the garden of life.