I know that many authors say editors don't edit anymore, but that's not been true in my experience.
— Victor LaValle
I like America, where believers eddy around each other like currents of air. Even our atheists are devout! To be an American is to be a believer. I don't have much faith in institutions, but I still believe in people.
The best monsters are our anxieties given form. They make sense on the level of a dream - or a nightmare.
Fear warps our understanding of reality and even our ability to see reality clearly.
What's beautiful about Godzilla is, of course, it's in every way a symbol of Japan dealing with the aftermath of the atomic bombs being dropped on them, and their ideas of how they're affected by it.
The profession is never going back to those days when a handful of wealthy people treated publishing like a hobby: one where the business can lose money because the family has lots of it to burn. Frankly, I don't think that model was ever sustainable, and it really only enriched a small number of writers.
You can't write a story about a mental hospital in the United States without facing the grand example of 'Cuckoo's Nest.'
I've spent my life visiting a handful of people who are very close to me when they've been committed to one hospital or another in New York.
One of the reasons I love devils so much is not based in my faith, but because as a kid, I grew up loving heavy metal and horror movies, and the devil is such a huge presence in both.
I have a very intimate knowledge of the world of the mentally ill and of life inside of, especially, public hospitals and the way people are treated in there and the way that they try to survive in there.
Clothes are a kind of uniform. A nun's habit, a surgeon's scrubs, a cop's uniform. People often say that when they put on a certain uniform, they actually think of themselves differently.
Bram Stoker's 'Dracula' was a story about the fear of immigration; the bad old bloodsucker swooping in from Eastern Europe and also preying upon 'our' vulnerable women.
The devil that stayed with me most vividly was the one from the cover of Iron Maiden's 'Number of the Beast' album.
I had a pretty bad time when I was an undergraduate at Cornell University. I failed out of school. I was much, much heavier.
