The reason why Hollywood cranks out so many sequels and adaptations is because the audience is so overwhelmed with choices, the only way to get them in the theater is to give them something familiar.

For those of us who aren't great with people, we figure that silence is always the safest bet. If you're an introvert, you spend so much of your time wishing that other people would just shut the hell up that you figure you're doing everyone a favor.

There are the people who read my horror novels - the first two of them - and they found them scary or whatever, and then there are some people who are maybe not entirely stable who think that they're real, who think that they're being stalked by the same demons or ghosts that are mentioned in the books.

We've gone from, in the '50s and '60s, being very optimistic about the future, where the future is all spaceships and The Jetsons and flying cars, to where we were just sure the future was going to be a massive pile of rubble.

After being raised as an evangelical Christian, I for years assumed that Christianity was the default - there were Christians, and then there were weirdos. I was shocked when, in college, I found that some people get offended when you tell them, for instance, that their recovery from surgery was a 'miracle.'

New technology is not good or evil in and of itself. It's all about how people choose to use it.

But in those first hours after you take it, your brain is tuned in like nothing you can imagine. Eyes like the Hubble telescope, sensing light that’s not even on the spectrum. You might be able to read minds, make time stop, cook pasta that’s exactly right every time.

That black pool of shame bubbled up in my head again. Then, a spark came along and set it alight. The choice between feeling the toxic ooze of self loathing and the fire of mindless rage is no choice at all.

Ravenous appetites and strange desires lurking just below, like I was bobbing on an inner tube in the middle of the ocean while below me swarmed the swift shadows of a vast school of Cthulhus.

John snatched the rebound, spun, jumped, slammed. He pumped his fist in victory. “Ring it up! Two hundred seventy-four to one thirty-seven!” In John’s game, each shot is worth one hundred and thirty-seven points.