To say that I wished I wasn't there would be a ludicrous understatement, but I'd only ever had the illusion of choice: We have to do this, Hank had said. It's for Ellis. To refuse would have been an act of calculated cruelty. And so, because of my hu...
Laine had been very proud of herself last night. Nicholas had talked about ghosts and magic and woven a bit of a spell himself. He'd sounded so convincing, so logical, so sad, that she'd found herself wanting to believe him. But testing prods at his ...
Perhaps the excellence of aphorisms consists not so much in the expression of some rare or abstruse sentiment, as in the comprehension of some obvious and useful truth in a few words. We frequently fall into error and folly, not because the true prin...
Anything which begins new and fresh will finally become old and silly. The educational institution is certainly no exception to this, although training the young is by implication an art for old people exclusively, and novelty in education is allied ...
If there's one American belief I hold above all others, it's that those who would set themselves up in judgment on matters of what is "right" and what is "best" should be given no rest; that they should have to defend their behavior most stringently....
And as I thought about the body of Ray Brower in this light- or lack of it- what I felt was not queasiness or fear that he would suddenly appear before us, a green and gibbering banshee whose purpose was to drive us back the way we had come before we...
When you love someone, truly love them, you lay your heart open to them. You give them a part of yourself that you give to no one else, and you let them inside a part of you that only they can hurt-you literally hand them the razor with a map of wher...
He's dead?' Vera asked. 'He's dead? Johnny's dead?' He covered the mouthpiece. 'No,' he said. 'Not dead.' 'Not dead! Not dead!' she cried, and fell on her knees in the phone nook with an audible thud. 'O God we most heartily thank Thee and ask that Y...
Do any of us, except in our dreams, truly expect to be reunited with our hearts' deepest loves, even when they leave us only for minutes, and on the most mundane of errands? No, not at all. Each time they go from our sight we in our secret hearts cou...
Fiction may be about lying – on the surface, anyway – but fiction is about hiding the truth behind those lies. It's about using those lies to say something true and real. It's about showing the reader something. It's about making them feel. And h...
Well in those parts (upcountry India) they have were-tigers, or think they have, and I must say that in this case, so far as sworn and uncontested evidence went, they had every ground for thinking so. However, as we gave up witchcraft prosecutions ab...
God makes it all come right in the end, that's what Johnnie told Dock Barker just before we parted company. I was raised a Christian-I admit I fell away a bit along my journey-and I believe that: we're stuck with what we have, but that's all right; i...
We all have scars, Kere. Inside and out. Wounds that go so deep, they leave a permanent mark on us. But that doesn’t make them ugly or revolting. They were hard lessons learned and for better or worse, they changed us. No matter how hard you try to...
The debate was wearing me out. Once you've posed that question, it won't go away. I think many people kill themselves simply to stop the debate about whether they will or they won't. Anything I thought or did was immediately drawn into the debate. Ma...
Here's what vampires shouldn't be: pallid detectives that drink Bloody Marys and work only at night; lovelorn southern gentlemen; anorexic teenage girls; boy-toys with big dewy eyes. What should they be? Killers, honey. Stone killers that can't get e...
I never think of stories as made things; I think of them as found things. As if you pull them out of the ground, and you just pick them up. Someone once told me that that was me low-balling my own creativity. That might or might not be the case. But ...
I asked Raghav, as we were looking over the wasteland, if the Muslims they burnt would beg for their lives. "Yes they would say, Have mercy on us. But we were filled with such hate; we had Radhabi Chawl on our minds. And even if there was one who sai...
To encounter the sacred is to be alive at the deepest center of human existence. Sacred places are the truest definitions of the earth; they stand for the earth immediately and forever; they are its flags and shields. If you would know the earth for ...
We are young,beautiful scum,pissed off with the world…We are the suicide of the non-generation.We are as far away from anything in the 80s as possible, e.g. 80s' pop automation, the long running saga of the whimsical pop essay and the intrinsic mus...
The life of this alien city was lived under the cathedral dome of the sky. People ate where the birds could share their food and gambled where any cutpurse could steal their winnings, they kissed in full view of strangers and even fucked in the shado...
You spill a lot of beans in historical fiction. Crime fiction is about spilling no beans at all. You spill the least beans you possibly can. So because I had already written historical fiction before I was really good at the spilling beans section, b...
