He had the raw, rough voice of one who had marinated his larynx in whiskey and slow-cooked it in years of cigarette smoke.

Denial couldn't be maintained.

Virtue is imaginative. Evil, repetitive.

The dead are merely the countrymen of my future.

There's sometimes a weird benefit to having an alcoholic, violent father. He really motivated me in that I never wanted to be anything like him.

The stairs creaked. They always creaked when creaking could lead to your death, and they never creaked when creaking didn't matter.

Readers will stay with an author, no matter what the variations in style and genre, as long as they get that sense of story, of character, of empathetic involvement.