51 Quotes by Benjamin Percy

It's still incredibly hard. Not just honing my craft but kicking down doors, getting my work published. Early on, I could have wallpapered my house with all the rejection letters sent my way. I put thousands of hours and pages into four novels that never saw the light of day.

Just about every weekend when I was growing up, we would throw rods and rifles and tents and shovels and pickaxes into the back of the truck and then head off to the side of a mountain or the bottom of a canyon. Hiking, fishing, hunting, rock-hounding: this is how my parents passed the time.

My voice is rather quirky. It's abysmally low. People often think I'm putting it on at first. Think drunk Darth Vader. Or Barry White singing country. It suits my dark material. When I do readings, I really play it up and go subterranean. I can make the phone book sound terrifying.

The USDA labs in Ames, Iowa, are level-four security clearance. Every nasty thing you can imagine is stored there. Ground zero for the apocalypse. And there's a day care right across the street.

There is no cure for prions. They are a protein-based disease that, among other things, targets and transforms your brain. The symptoms reveal themselves differently in each host, and you might go months or you might go years before you realize you're infected.

Yes, I grew up with guns. For my 16th birthday, in fact, I received a .357 instead of a car. But there was nothing playful about them; they were tools. My parents went through a back-to-the-land phase. Most of our vegetables and fruits came from our own garden.

I grew up on genre - on Westerns, spy thrillers, sci-fi, fantasy novels, horror novels. Especially horror novels.

I wanted it to be as multi-windowed as possible, so that the reader felt like they were seeing all the different ways in to a big haunted house.

People talk about me as masculine. Because of the way I walk and talk and crank out pull-ups and smell like bacon.