Indifference, to me, is the epitome of evil.

You teach best what you most need to learn.

The only pain in pleasure is the pleasure of the pain.

Stephen King in many respects is a wonderful writer. He has made a contribution. People in the future will be able to pick up Stephen King’s books and learn a lot about who we were...

I just want to be told a story, and I want to believe I’m living that story, and I don’t give a thought to influences or method or any other writerly concerns.

Violence commands both literature and life, and violence is always crude and distorted.

Because of indifference, one dies before one actually dies.

To have guilt you’ve got to earn guilt, but sometimes when you earn it, you don’t feel the guilt you ought to have. And that’s what The Firebombing is about.

It’s made me more expectant of the imminent return of Jesus, and also more sensitive to the people around me. Knowing Jesus will return soon makes me want all the more to tell people about...

I’ve always been a fan of the 19th century novel, of the novel that is plotted, character-driven, and where the passage of time is almost as central to the novel as a major minor character,...

Homo sapiens is the species that invents symbols in which to invest passion and authority, then forgets that symbols are inventions.

There was no reality to pain when it left one, thought while it held one fast all other realities failed.

But when I don’t smoke I scarcely feel as if I’m living. I don’t feel as if I’m living unless I’m killing myself.

Civilization… wrecks the planet from seafloor to stratosphere.

I started writing seriously when I was 18, wrote my first novel when I was 22, and I’ve never stopped writing since.

People live longer today than they ever have. They live happier lives, have more knowledge, more information. All this is the result of communications technology. How is any of that bad?

The vampires have always been metaphors for me. They’ve always been vehicles through which I can express things I have felt very, very deeply.

I’m fascinated by almost any mythology that I can get my hands on.

My decision to start a new one is just that, a decision, since I never get inspirations.

Mediocrity would always win by force of numbers, but it would win only more mediocrity.

A destruction, an annihilation that only man can provoke, only man can prevent.

Every time a friend succeeds, I die a little.

When I was a junior camp counselor and it was my job to tell the campers a bedtime story or devotional, I would tell them a rapture story.

The building of the architecture of a novel – the craft of it – is something I never tire of.

It’s always obvious to me when someone is looking at me with an idea of who I am and hoping that that’s the person I’m going to be. No matter how subtle it is, it’s...

That gentleman will call the Joint Chiefs of Staff. I think they’re scared of him. They’re merely professional killers; he’s in advertising!

Publishing is a very mysterious business. It is hard to predict what kind of sale or reception a book will have, and advertising seems to do very little good.

Strong beliefs win strong men, and then make them stronger.

I believe in the compelling power of love. I do not understand it. I believe it to be the most fragrant blossom of all this thorny existence.

The control of information is something the elite always does, particularly in a despotic form of government. Information, knowledge, is power. If you can control information, you can control people.

I was obsessed with religious questions, the basics: Why are we here? Why is the world so beautiful?

And I am interested in the fact that class is very much a factor in America, even though it’s not supposed to be.

Every man must wear out at least one pair of fools shoes.

Not to transmit an experience is to betray it.

He can’t imagine the result of the mission because he never saw it.

Gil Thorpe is a great diversion and is to book writing as poetry is to prose.

For this is the journey that men and women make, to find themselves. If they fail in this, it doesn’t matter much else what they find.

It wasn’t conscious, but I guess that one book is the reaction to the other. The first is so imprisoned in a male point-of-view, and the second is a point-of-view that can go anywhere it...

It can’t possibly last for years and browsing has its limits. Only a certain amount is healthy or wise.

The universe is like a safe to which there is a combination. But the combination is locked up in the safe.

The best way to pay for a lovely moment is to enjoy it.

After my years in Hollywood, I got tired of apologizing for work that really wasn’t mine to begin with.

I always liked spy stories.

The murals in restaurants are on par with the food in museums.

I do want to go another way – to write something completely different.

That process by which you become a writer is a pretty lonely one. We don’t have a group apprenticeship like a violinist might training for an orchestra.

I save the best of myself for novels, and I believe it shows.

No matter how vital experience might be while you lived it, no sooner was it ended and dead than it became as lifeless as the piles of dry dust in a school history book.

Peace is our gift to each other.

To say that its wrong to feel this way is not the point; you do feel it. All you see is a flash of fire and, depending on your altitude, you don’t even see that...