Quotes About Author

Plotting is difficult for me, and always has been. I do that before I actually start writing, but I always do characters, and the arc of the story, first... You can't do anything without a story arc. Where is it going to begin, where will it end.

I'm thinking about color all the time. Sometimes even as far back as the plotting sequence.

I went on the 'Letterman' show the first time to plug something, and then I came back as the Fool, the court jester.

The Book of Revelation is such a dream landscape that you can plug any major conflict in it.

I would have rather been beat by a plumber than Kathy Griffin.

One thing my fans might not know about me is that when I graduated from college I went to work for a plumbing company, and so I was pretty much a full time plumber.

I made three campaign movies. When you make one you are constantly being told what to do by press secretaries. I got tired of that. Plus, I'm older now with children. I can't be riding along on a campaign bus.

So we make this big loan, most of it comes back to the United States, the country is left with the debt plus lots of interest, and they basically become our servants, our slaves. It's an empire. There's no two ways about it. It's a huge empire. It's been extremely successful.

There are always pluses and minus to commercialization. It broadcasts something to the masses. So that's the plus. The minus is it may lose some of its meaning if you dilute it.

There are lots of really interesting little planets out there in the Kuiper Belt, but Pluto's the only one that's got all the cool attributes.

I gotta say, Pluto is such a great character, and if I ever got to work with him, I'd be very happy. The scene where he gets caught in fly paper, he's such a great dog!

If we doubt the power of literature and art to civilise, how come no one has ever been mugged by a person carrying a well-thumbed copy of 'Middlemarch' in his back pocket?

It's always been my dream to have a monster rhythm section that's just all groove and pocket.

Well, I think the best form would be to put money directly in the pockets of consumers.

I'm a comic writer, in some ways, and a comic person when I'm up at a podium, in order to disguise the fact that in my heart I'm disgustingly earnest.

Do not make the writer stand behind a podium. Anything but. A podium reeks of the lecture hall. A music stand, on the other hand, is nicely minimal and lends the writer - who usually needs all the help s/he can get - a musician's second-hand cool-factor.

One thing I incorporated in my novel 'The Poe Shadow' was the little-known fact that documents show Poe inherited a slave and decided to free him.

Poe was plagued and haunted most of all by something pretty banal: poverty. Probably the most eccentric decision in life was to become a writer in an age when making a living at it was nearly impossible.

I grew up on Edgar Allen Poe, and I loved Alfred Hitchcock's movies.

I did that Grammys thing - I did a little freeform poem.

I like poems and keep sharing them online.

I used to carry about with me a German map-case filled with poems.

A discrete series is a series of terms each of which is empirically derived, each one of which is empirically true. And this is the reason for the fragmentary character of those poems.

I didn't think about whether I was writing poems. I was thinking. And the more I was thinking, the more there was I didn't understand.