Everything has to be pulling weight in a short story for it to be really of the first order.
I'm always cast in these strange men. . . that's not me, really.
I don't like mushiness. I'm a very emotional person but I hate sentimentality. I don't like great demonstrations of emotion. But as I'm getting older, I'm getting much more open about all that.
I am able to play monsters well. I understand monsters. I understand madmen.
We all dream. We dream vividly, depending on our nature. Our existence is beyond our explanation, whether we believe in God or we have religion or we're atheist.
I'm more and more convinced that life is a dream. What has happened to me is surely a dream.
That's what happens if you don't address the darkness in you. You become repressed and depressed and suicidal.
Jealousy is such a direct attack on whatever measure of confidence you’ve been able to muster. But if you continue to write, you are probably going to have to deal with it, because some wonderful, dazzling successes are going to happen for some of the most awful, angry, undeserving writers you know-people who are, in other words, not you.
I felt a kinship with country music, because country has lyrics that tell stories
In modern society most of us don't want to be in touch with ourselves; we want to be in touch with other things like religion, sports, politics, a book - we want to forget ourselves. Anytime we have leisure, we want to invite something else to enter us, opening ourselves to the television and telling the television to come and colonize us.
One of the rules that I always follow is that no matter how crazy characters may act, and no matter how absurd or strange their actions may be, that it's justified in the character's mind why they are doing it. Not to get all heady about it, but it's fun for me to test how far I can go with things while still keeping it grounded enough that you believe that the character really believes that what he's doing will get him what he wants. It's a personal challenge to me to see how far I can go with that.