‘Now I lay me down to sleep…’” To me, just random noise. Gibberish. I wasn’t sure exactly what it was, but I felt that, when it came to God, there was a broken promise in...

Ah. And then you kill him.””No,” Arkwright replied patiently. “We are British. We avoid murder if we can help it.{…}

One lesson I learned from ‘The Monstrumologist’ was never to get too attached to your own characters. That’s harder in practice than in theory. At the end of the third book – which coincided with...

We have survived the death of our childhood. We are soldiers now, maybe the last soldiers who will ever fight, the Earth’s final and only hope, united as one in the spirit of vengeance.

They made a major mistake,” he blurted out, “the dumb bastards, when they didn’t start by killing you first.””Benjamin Thomas Parish, that was the sweetest and most bizarre compliment anyone’s ever given me.”I kissed him...

You’re the mayfly,’ he murmurs.And then Evan Walker kisses me.Holding my hand across his chest, his other hand sliding across my neck, his touch feathery soft, sending a shiver that travels down my spine into...

My foray into young adult lit was by no means planned. I wrote the first ‘Alfred Kropp’ book as an adult novel, which everyone loved but no one would publish – until I changed my...

That’s the cost. That’s the price. Get ready, because when you crush the humanity out of humans, you’re left with humans with no humanity.In other words, you get what you pay for, motherfucker

There are some we cannot help but take an instant dislike to.

It wasn’t aliens that first made us gear up for war; it was our fellow humans.

The beautiful wooden board on a stand in my father’s study. The gleaming ivory pieces. The stern king. The haughty queen. The noble knight. The pious bishop. And the game itself, the way each piece...

We have just discovered our dear colleague butchered in a hotel room, and you wish to discuss literature?

He didn’t like to see animals in captivity. When he looked into their eyes, something in their eyes looked back at him.

Being born at the tag-end of the baby boom, I was destined (or doomed, depending on how you look at it) to fall in love with sci-fi. It was one of my first literary loves,...

You can’t band together to fight without trust. And without trust, there was no hope.

It kills me. The way he trusted. LIke the way we trusted before they came and blue the whole goddamned world apart. Trusted that when it got dark there would be light. Trusted that when...

I would kill for a cheeseburger. Honestly. If I stumbled across someone eating a cheeseburger, I would kill them for it.

‘Tax Collector’ was optioned for a series with F/X, but it never happened. I guess they ran into a problem trying to figure out why someone would tune in to watch a show about a...

Onto his stomach. Then knees. Then hands. His elbows quivered, his wrists threatened to buckle under his own weight. Self-centered, stubborn, sentimental, childish, vain. I am humanity. Cynical, naive, kind, cruel, soft as down, hard...

We never see ourselves the way we truly are, do we, Will? The mirror lies to us.

When I cry – when I let myself cry – that’s who I cry for. I don’t cry for myself. I cry for the Cassie that’s gone.And I wonder what that Cassie would think of...

People change spouses more often than they clean out closets. And every time they say, ‘This is the one. This is the person I’m going to spend eternity with.’ Then forty or fifty years go...

Too many people say something when they really have nothing to say.

Beside me the monstrumologist murmured, “I believe I am in hell, therefore I am there.

I’ve always wanted to write science fiction. It was one of my first loves, and I knew if I became a writer someday I’d probably write something in the science fiction vein, but I hesitated...

I’ve always thought, if heaven is such a wonderful place, why is entering it so absurdly easy? Confess your sins, ask forgiveness—and that is all? No matter what your crimes?

There’s the bullshit you know that you know; the bullshit you don’t know and know you don’t know; and the bullshit you just think you know but really don’t.

What is life without death, Beneficent? You of all people can answer that question. A never-ending orgy of emptiness that you stuff with meaningless activity. Everything is disposable, including your relationships–especially your your relationships.

Great sci-fi has never shied from tackling the Big Questions, though really great sci-fi never forgets to entertain us along the way. Shock and awe applies to art, as well.

Everything’s going to be okay’, because that’s what I wanted him to say and it’s what he wanted to say and that’s what you do when the curtain is falling — you give the line...

It’s hopeless. And it’s stupid. It’s suicidal. But love is a weapon they have no answer for. They know how you think, but they can’t know what you feel.

Time for the world to end.

We’re all dead…Some of us are just a little further along than others.

And it occurs to me that there’s no real difference between us, the living and the dead; it’s just a matter of tense: past-dead and future-dead

The nights did not come gently but seemed to slam down angrily upon the Earth.

The way we learn to write is the way we learn to talk: We listen to others and start mimicking speech, and that’s how we come to become speakers. Writers you admire, you admire the...

You know how sometimes you tell yourself that you have a choice, but really you don’t have a choice? Just because there are alternatives doesn’t mean they apply to you.

The answer is they didn’t. They aren’t here, Razor. They never were it’s just us. It’s always been just us.

You’re mortal, and only a mortal can afford to be romantic. When we conquered death, we murdered love.

When the power goes out, we jump up to…To what? It’s weird. We’re so used to electricity, when it’s gone, we don’t know what to do. So we jump up or squeal or start jabbering...

This place can’t be heaven, it doesn’t have the right vibe.

But we fall only that we might rise, Alfred. All of us fall; all of us, as you say, screw up. Falling is not important. It is how we get up after the fall that’s...

Human beings are remarkably resilient. When you think about it, our species has been teetering upon the edge of the existential cliff since Hiroshima. In short, we endure.

I do not mean to mock or ridicule your life’s work, for in one way at least it mimics my own: We have dedicated our lives to the pursuit of phantoms. The difference is the...

We’re here, and then we’re gone, and it’s not about the time we’re here, but what we do with the time.

In the 4th Wave, you can’t trust that people are still people. But you can trust that your gun is still your gun.

The cold stars spun to the ancient rhythm, the august march of an everlasting symphony. They are old, the stars, and their memory is long.

The aliens of ‘The 5th Wave’ are not the aliens we’ve imagined. Not the aliens we’d like to attack us.

But I don’t panic. I don’t bolt like a frightened gazelle. I am more than the sum of my fear. It isn’t fear that will defeat them. Not fear or faith or hope or even...

Nothing makes us love something more than the loss of it.