Verbs allow you to communicate a story in a much more converged or involuntary way for a reader. The verbs allow you to come in under the radar, below people’s defenses.
Horror stories give us a way of exhausting our emotions around social issues, like a woman’s right to an abortion, which I always thought was the core of ‘Rosemary’s Baby,’ or the backlash against feminism which I always thought was the core to ‘Stepford Wives.’
A short story is something that you can hold in your mind. You can really analyze how the entire thing works, like a machine.
Of the big horror movies of the ’70s, you have ‘The Omen,’ ‘The Sentinel,’ ‘Rosemary’s Baby,’ ‘The Stepford Wives,’ ‘Burnt Offerings’ – these are all romantic fatalist movies where there’s a sort of glimmer of hope… but darkness wins.
My father worked for the railroad, and whenever a train crashed, we would go as a family and steal food from the boxcars. One year we stole a case of butterscotch pudding that was for export to Israel. It took us years to get through.
There are people out there who will not read books, but somehow they’ll read my books.
To be honest, I hate silence.
A big reason why I started writing is I felt that fiction had stopped evolving. All other entertainments were getting better, constantly, as technology allowed. Movies. Video games. Music.
We don’t have friends, so we watch ‘Friends’ on TV.
I never think I’m making fun of my culture. In fact I’m making fun of myself, because I catch myself doing some very stupid things.
Crap has always happened, crap is happening, and crap will continue to happen.
We’re so much more likely to feel sympathy for an animal than another person; thus, the best fiction uses animals to define truly humane behavior.
I take a lot of flak from the counter-establishment for selling out.
In books, you can just wallow in dialogue, and you can just wallow in written words. In screenplays, every line has to serve the purpose of the line that’s implied before it and the line that’s implied after it. Maybe five lines have to do the work of fifty lines.
My stories always have these twisted happy endings, and the boy always gets the girl.
If we all lived according to the teachings of Jesus Christ, life would be much simpler.
I believe in something. But I don’t believe that anything can hold a grudge for long enough to condemn its creation to eternal punishment. Nobody can hold a grudge that long, even God.
I want my characters to really overuse their coping mechanisms to the point where they break down within 300 pages.
So many of our enormous emotional crises are lived through the media. They’re lived through movies; they’re lived through what we watch on television – they’re not actual events in our life.
I write in a noisy, distracting world so the books can be read there.
I get a lot of letters from women who insist that ‘Fight Club’ is not just a guy thing. They insist that women have the same rage and need the same outlet.
The first step to eternal life is you have to die.
When I was little, my grandma used to get romance novels, and she would get hundreds of these, and she’d read a dozen a month.
I was born in 1962, and it seems that throughout my entire life the world has demanded peace but maintained conflict.
My parents divorced about the same time the movie ‘The Parent Trap’ came out, about two twins at camp who scheme to get their parents back together. I had that same fantasy.
