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Each reader needs to bring his or her own mind and heart to the text.
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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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If you want to publish two books a year under your own name and your publisher doesn't, maybe you need a different publisher.
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I've got a long list of books I wish I'd never written-and I've kept them all out of print for the past 20 years.
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When I'm working on a novel, I work 70-hour weeks.
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'Fear is a hammer, and when the people are beaten finally to the conviction that their existence hangs by a frayed thread, they will be led where they need to go.' 'Which is where?' 'To a responsible future in a properly managed world.'
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Nothing gives us courage more readily than the desire to avoid looking like a damn fool.
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'Where there's cake, there's hope. And there's always cake.'
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He's a hollow man. He believes in anything. Hollow men are vulnerable to anyone who offers them something that might fill the void and make them feel less empty.
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Your mind always does worse things than people can show in a movie.
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Dr. Bob managed so successfully to turn the answer to every question into a mini-lecture on self-esteem and positive thinking, that Ethan wanted Hazard to arrest him on charges of Felony Cliché and Practicing Philosophy Without An Idea.
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I think the world is full of evil people. I think in some ways we're in more danger now than before.
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Civilization rests on the fact that most people do the right thing most of the time.
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Some days I'm lucky to squeeze out a page of copy that pleases me, but I get as many as six or seven pages on a very good day; the average is probably three pages.
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I don't find slashing and blood flying everywhere to be scary. I just find it repulsive.
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Readers will stay with an author, no matter what the variations in style and genre, as long as they get that sense of story, of character, of empathetic involvement.
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In a world that daily disconnects further from truth, more and more people accept the virtual in place of the real, and all things virtual are also malleable.
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Although I've said a million times that I'm not a horror writer, I do like horror.
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If something in your writing gives support to people in their lives, that's more than just entertainment-which is what we writers all struggle to do, to touch people.
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Somebody asked me about the current choice we're being given in the presidential election. I said, Well, it's like two of the scariest movies I can imagine.
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Although charismatic, James Dean is no Harrison Ford. In the majority of his movies, sooner or later he got the crap beaten out of him.
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Loneliness comes in two basic varieties. When it results from a desire for solitude, loneliness is a door we close against the world. When the world instead rejects us, loneliness is an open door, unused.
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There's lots of law these days, but not much justice. Celebrities murder their wives and go free. A mother kills her children, and the news people on TV say she's the victim and want you to send money to her lawyers. When everything's upside down like this, what fool just sits back and thinks justice will prevail?
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Change isn't easy, Micky. Changing the way you live means changing the way you think. Changing the way you think means changing what you believe about life. That's hard, sweetie. When we make our own misery, we sometimes cling to it even when we want so bad to change, because the misery is something we know. The misery is comfortable.