Quotes from Chuck Hogan

One pleasure of working on a trilogy is watching characters warp and grow over time.

The best way to kill a good thing is question it to death.

In my formative years, I never missed the 'Creature Double Feature' on Saturday afternoon TV, even if it meant switching back and forth between 'Gamera' and the Red Sox. I did a book report on Stephen King's 'Night Shift' in seventh grade. Unrated Italian horror movies became a weekly rite of passage once I hit seventeen.

Books and movies are never finished, only surrendered.

I love my Kindle, but there are many books that I need to physically own. I think having the choice makes all the difference. Instant gratification - buying a book digitally and owning it sixty seconds later - really is a revolutionary act.

I was a huge horror fan, especially in my teenage years. Back then, there were a lot of Italian horror movies - some zombie, some just really strange movies that made no sense. I was really into shock and gore.

Dracula appeared at a time of great technological revolution, utilizing telegraphs, typing machines, and blood transfusions.

The beautiful thing about 'The Strain Trilogy' is the ability to move from gore to high fable to creeping dread to domestic drama to unbearable suspense to the uncanny and on and on. The epic journey is designed to support these swings in mood, and that complements my tastes, which are wide-ranging.

I respond to authenticity and originality, and I've been a fan of Don Winslow's ever since 'The Power Of The Dog.'

Go play golf. Go to the golf course. Hit the ball. Find the ball. Repeat until the ball is in the hole. Have fun. The end.

Nothing can unman you like an un-man.

Even if a thing is doomed—there is that moment of absurd hope that is worth the fall, that is worth everything.

So why go out as a question mark when you can go out as an exclamation point instead?

The only people who lawyer up faster than dirty cops are dirty lawyers.

Hiring a guy with more confirmed kills than college credits was a tough sell.

These were kids for whom simple self-destruction wasn't enough.

The best way to kill a good thing is question it to death.

How good it must feel to stand for something. To commit oneself to a lost cause. To gather with other like-minded souls and lock arms and sing songs under the stars. Wallowing in futility. Championing it, actually. How wonderful it must be to fight only losing battles. How safe and how comfortable. To posit yourself squarely on the side of peace and good. How brave the sand on an eroding beach.

And there in her bewilderment he recognized his grave mistake. He had surrendered himself to Claire, just as Krista had to him. When you give someone the power to save you, you give them the power to destroy you as well.

This is not intended as a record or a chronicle, but the poetry of fossils, a reminiscence of the end of civilization. The dinosaurs left behind almost no trace of themselves. A few bones preserved in the amber, the contents of their stomachs, their waste. I only hope that we may leave behind something more than they did.

Thinking about drinking now was like fantasizing about the perfect crime. How he would do it—if he were going to do it.

I'm a fucking porcupine with points.

At root, the business of baseball was no better or different from the movies or from church: put on a show, promise people something transcendent, and then bleed the suckers dry.

He was backing away behind cover fire with the engaged smile of a teenager seeing his violent daydreams come true.