Justin Cronin

“One of the things you get to do as a writer is that you get to learn new stuff all the time, and I hope that I'm a better writer when I'm 70 than I was when I was 30. That's one of the great things about a literary career.”

“The heart, once broken, stayed broken.”

“I was very much a child of the Cold War.”

“For the lips of an immoral woman drip honey, and her mouth is smoother than oil; but in the end she is as bitter as wormword, sharp as a two-edged sword. Her feet go down to death, her steps lay hold of hell”

“It was more than physical attraction; it was the broken thing inside him she loved most of all, the unreachable place where he kept his sadness. Because that was the thing about Peter Jaxon that nobody knew but her, because she loved him like she did: how terribly sad he was. And not just in the day-to-day, the ordinary sadness everyone carried for the things and people they had lost; his was something more. If she could find this sadness, Sara believed, and take it from him, then he would love her in return.”

“Writing is a job: you must show up.”

“And indeed, I am a warmhearted and thoroughly domestic man who gets up and makes pancakes for his children and kisses them on the head when he sends them off to their day.”

“I would not say I was a nonbeliever; rather, that I gave little if any thought to celestial concerns. It did not seem to me that God, whoever he was, would be the sort of god to take an interest in the minutiae of human affairs, or that this fact released us from the duty to go about our lives in a spirit of decency to others.”

“It's children, he thought, that give us our lives; without them we are nothing, we are here and then gone, like the dust.”

“All things fell into the past but one; and what that was, was love.”

“One thing that worried me was how writers get categorized and so they end up having to write the same kind of book again and again. That is fine if it is what you want to do, but I would rather be locked in the trunk of my car with a weasel than write the same book every three years until I die.”

“For the first time in my life, I felt the pain of missing people I had not yet left.”

“My theory of characterization is basically this: Put some dirt on a hero, and put some sunshine on the villain, one brush stroke of beauty on the villain.”

“I have any number of completely dark obsessions and fascinations, and none of this was present in my profile or my growing profile as a writer.”

“If you write a good action sequence well in a novel, you're already writing it for film, because the only way to do it well is to use some of the same tricks. They're rhetorical, not visual, but it's the same move.”

“I tend to start at 9 o'clock in the morning and write until 3. Those are my best hours. They fit the other rhythms of the world. So I write for six hours, pretty much without any breaks.”

“How wonderful to be read to. To be carried from this world and into another, born away on words.”

“I'm still an English professor at Rice University here in Houston. They've been very generous in letting me on a very long leash to just work on 'The Passage' and its sequels.”

“And I grew up on a steady diet of science fiction, especially apocalyptic and postapocalyptic fiction.”

“You learn to write by reading, and my experiences and tastes as a reader are pretty wide.”