"I write about Maine because it's what I know best,
but I also write about Maine because it's the place I love best....You have to spend a lot of time in a place before you start
to catch the beat of the people's voices, their dialects, and the way they live."
"I watched Titanic when I got home
from the hospital and cried, and I knew that my I.Q. had been damaged."
"I write for only two reasons: to please myself and
to please others."
"People want to know why I do this, why I write such
gross stuff. I like to tell them that I have the heart of a boy... and I keep it in a jar on my desk."
"If I cannot horrify, I'll go for the gross-out.
I'm not proud."
"If it was just the money, I could hang up my jock
and hit the showers... or spend the rest of my life on some Caribbean island, catching the rays and seeing how long I could
grow my fingernails."
"My obsession is with the macabre."
"I still see stories as a great thing, something which
not only enhances lives but actually saves them."
"Tom Cruise, Bruce Springsteen, Stephen King, John
Grisham, Bob Dylan- we're all freaks. That's what we are. And people come to look at us."
"The stories are mostly about people and not about
monsters."
"I am the literary equivalent of a Big Mac and fries."
"It's better to be good than evil, but one achieves
goodness at a terrific cost."
"Sometimes I speak to groups of people who are interested
in writing or in literature, and before the question-and-answer period is over, someone always rises and asks this question:
Why do you choose to write about such gruesome subjects? I usually answer this with another question: Why to you assume
that I have a choice?"
"Since 1980 or so, some critics have been saying I
could publish my laundry list and sell a million copies or so, but these are for the most part critics who think that's what
I've been doing all along. The people who read my work for pleasure obviously feel differently."
"I think that in really good stories, the whole is
always greater than the sum of the parts."
"The glory of a good tale is that it is limitless
and fluid; a good tale belongs to each reader in its own particular way."
