The worst day of writing is still better than the best day of telemarketing.

I liked the idea of being a writer more than I liked the idea of writing.

I started writing 'The Lobster Kings' the day after I sold my first novel, 'Touch.'

I love teaching creative writing, and I think I'm good at it, but in a different life, I could have been teaching elementary school.

I grew up reading thrillers, science fiction, fantasy - you name it - and one day I asked myself if there was a reason why a fear of spiders was so common. Was there something buried deep in our evolutionary history that made being scared of spiders a survival instinct?

When I'm writing a novel, one of the things I do is get big poster boards. They're actually canvases that artists use. And I keep all the characters' names on them. If you write a big novel, there's a lot of characters.