Whatever you love opens its secrets to you.
You can't count on notoriety lasting very long, and there's no way to predict whether anyone will care about your books or you in three years, let alone ten or twenty.
The thing that grounds you, and the thing that really gives you a sense of wholeness, is your family, friends and your community. Those are the things that can mirror back to you what you're experiencing, and can affirm to you that the stories you are telling are true.
I have long admired Caroline Leavitt's probing insight into people, her wit and compassion, her ability to find humor in dark situations, and conversely, her tenderness towards characters.
I've had a lot of different lives. I was adopted, I grew up in Nebraska, and then I went to Northwestern. . . Then I had this really extraordinary, different life than my parents.
I also have just my own limits about stuff. I'm not interested in writing graphically about sexual assault for example. I feel like the stuff that I'm fascinated by is the stuff that's part of the public imagination of what horror is. The bleakness is a different issue. I think that just stems from my personality. I wish that I offered a little more glimmer of hope sometimes.
I've been reading Peter Straub since I was a teenager, and his work is hardwired into my brain. A Dark Matter contains echoes of all that has been great about Straub's previous work and builds upon it. This Rashomon-like tale is as spooky and frightening as anything he has written, but it's also an intense and moving celebration of love. Out of the darkness comes, ultimately, a surprising and haunting sense of joy.
You must choose a road for yourself.
I think while zealots fast and frown, And fight for two or seven, That there are fifty roads to town, And rather more to Heaven.
A garden really lives only insofar as it is an expression of faith, the embodiment of a hope and a song of praise.
Use what you have in your gym. Try to do my training program, you will lose your fat and gain muscles at the same time.