"We make up horrors to help us cope with the real ones."

"I am the literary equivalent of a Big Mac and fries."

"I make all this shit up and people pay me. It's great, you know, thank you. All right so you guys put my kids through college and I scared the shit out of you while I was doing it. It's terrific. It's…"

"Books are a uniquely portable magic."

"Sometimes you have to go on when you don't feel like it, and sometimes you're doing good work when it feels like all you're managing is to shovel shit from a sitting position."