“To have endured horrors, to have seen the worst of humanity and have your life made unrecognizable by it, to come out of all that honorable and brave— that was magical.”

“If you focus on the humanity of your stories, your characters, then the horror will be stronger, scarier. Without the humanity, the horror becomes nothing more than a tawdry parlor trick. All flash and no magic, and worst of all, no heart.”

“Small causes can often have large effects. Smaller causes can have even bigger effects, and the very biggest effects frequently have no cause at all. Witness, for example, the world. It was created out of nothing, and that has made it the worst calamity the world has ever seen.”

“Just for the record, I have come to fear all of your ideas in advance, simply from having endured enough of them.”

“I have seen something of the horrors of war, and much too much of the worse horrors of peace.”

“Because you have to just go with the flow. Your life is not your own, with people coming in and out all the time. You get mellow because you have to.”