“Sometimes human places, create inhuman monsters.”

“This inhuman place makes human monsters.”

“I try to create sympathy for my characters, then turn the monsters loose.”

“Monsters are real, and ghosts are real too. They live inside us, and sometimes, they win.”

“Words create sentences; sentences create paragraphs; sometimes paragraphs quicken and begin to breathe.”

“I believe these stories exist because we sometimes need to create unreal monsters and bogies to stand in for all the things we fear in our real lives: the parent who punches instead of kissing, the auto accident that takes a loved one, the cancer we one day discover living in our own bodies. If such terrible occurrences were acts of darkness, they might actually be easier to cope with. But instead of being dark, they have their own terrible brilliance. . . and none shine so bright as the acts of cruelty we sometimes perpetrate in our own families.”

“Adults are the real monsters.”