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I'm either a mutant or a cripple, and I refuse to be a cripple. People pity cripples, but they're afraid of mutants … Fear implies respect.
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… less real than such threats as a man with a gun, a woman with a knife, or a U.S. Senator with an idea.
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… mankind has no right to employ its genius in the creation of another intelligent species, then treat it like property. If we've come so far that we can create as God creates, then we have to learn to act with the justice and mercy of God.
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Every book has some real life in it. I was never pursued by an evil twin clone, but everything else in MR. MURDER was pretty much out of my own life.
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Vladimir Nabokov said the two great evils of the 20th century were Marx and Freud. He was absolutely correct.
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The only reason I would write a sequel is if I were struck by an idea that I felt to be equal to the original. Too many sequels diminish the original.
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My wife is my first audience. She's a tough lady, so I can't say that I ever scare her. Except, of course, when she sees me the way I look before breakfast.
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I don't write a quick draft and then revise; instead, I work slowly page by page, revising and polishing.
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Books were this wonderful escape for me because I could open a book and disappear into it, and that was the only way out of that house when I was a kid.
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Literary fiction, as a strict genre, is all but dead. Meanwhile, most genres flourish.
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Writing a novel is like making love, but it's also like having a tooth pulled. Pleasure and pain. Sometimes it's like making love while having a tooth pulled.
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A politician's goal is always to manipulate public debate. I think there are some politicians with higher goals. But all of them get corrupted by power.
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Human beings can always be relied upon to exert, with vigor, their God-given right to be stupid.
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I receive about 10,000 letters a year from readers, and in the first year after a book is published, perhaps 5,000 letters will deal specifically with that piece of work.
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How can you hope to win against goddamn time travelers? It's like playing blackjack when the dealer is God. … Come to think of it, all of life is a blackjack game with God as the dealer, isn't it? So this is no worse.
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Never, never try to scope the market.
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If someone wrote it and it had a peculiar twist, I've read it.
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Like all of us in this storm between birth and death, I can wreak no great changes on the world, only small changes for the better, I hope, in the lives of those I love.
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I never discuss a novel while I'm writing it, for fear that talking about it will diminish my desire to write it.
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There's sometimes a weird benefit to having an alcoholic, violent father. He really motivated me in that I never wanted to be anything like him.
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Each reader needs to bring his or her own mind and heart to the text.
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I think it's perfectly just to refuse service to anyone based on behavior, but not based on race or religion.
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I think it's the people who have no doubt that every word they put down is gold that probably don't write very well.
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If you want to publish two books a year under your own name and your publisher doesn't, maybe you need a different publisher.