Quotes from Justin Cronin

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.

One of the things I constantly think about as a writer is the way in which people are full of contradictions - there's all this contradictory information inside a human personality.

I've never written a movie, I'm not in the movie business. I go out to L.A. and I'm like everyone else wandering around in a daze hoping I see movie stars. I write the novels that the movies are based on, and that feels like enough of a job for me.

Choosing writing as a career, just by itself, is a measure of not being a calculating person.

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 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.

I think many years ago I got on a bus in L.A. and drove around to see the stars' homes, but that's the extent of my direct experience in Hollywood.

It's different being afraid when there's the hope it will amount to something.

I was a 'Planet of the Apes'-obsessed kid.

I was very much a child of the Cold War.

So, whenever I'm writing, I'm writing in the presence of all the other books I've read and I think we all are.

Writers who pretend that everything they're doing is completely new are full of it.

I came to Houston for a job, the reason most people move halfway across the country with a first grader and a five-week-old. I came here to teach at Rice.

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

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.

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

Even on the darkest night, my friend, life will have its way.

Miles away from everthing and everyone I've ever known or loved. I feel as if I've entered a new era of my life. What strange places our lives carry us to.

My inventing time is all done under the influence of aerobic exercise. Basically, I do all my thinking while I run.

So perhaps the greatest worry of all was that one day you would realize that all the worries of your life amounted to one thing: the desire to just stop worrying.

If asked to name the worst moment of his life, Michael Fisher wouldn't have hesitated to give his answer: it was when the lights went out.

I'm an ecumenical reader, grew up with all sorts of fiction, teach writing, went to the Iowa Writers' Workshop, so my tastes and interests are broad.

I saw my one purpose in that moment, looking into that little girls eyes. I was the one who was meant to save her, that was my one purpose all this time.

It had never occurred to her that God would cry, but of course that was wrong. God would be crying all the time. He would cry and cry and never stop.