Top 72 Quotes & Sayings by Justin Cronin

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.

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.

If you try to write 1,000 words a day, as I do, after 100 days you'll look up and have a book. It may be a mess, and you may have to revise it 50 times, but you can't revise it if you haven't written it.

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'm a workmanlike writer. I show up every day and treat it like a job. The old rule that writing is like any other job, the first rule is that you must show up. I'm at the keyboard from 9 to 4 every day.

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.

One of the great themes in American literature is the individual's confrontation with the vast open spaces of the continent.

I like creating villains.

Every book has got its challenges. You run into a plot point that you can't figure out, or a scene that you struggle to write and have to write 50 times.

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

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 grew up during the Cold War, when everything seemed very tenuous. For many years, right up until the fall of the Berlin Wall, I had vivid nightmares of nuclear apocalypse.

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.

Behind every writer stands a very large bookshelf.

Vampires have always been hot. They are one of our most durable monsters. It's one of those stories that galvanizes us early and it's always going on.

There's an outline for each of the books that I adhere to pretty closely, but I'm not averse to taking it in a new direction, as long as I can get it back to where I need it to go.

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.

If you are writing any book about the end of the world, what you are really writing about is what's worth saving about it.

The future that I will not live to see is the one my children will live in. That's my immortality. And I shouldn't try to mortgage theirs for my benefit.

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

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

I like to break left when people think I'm going to go right.

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.

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.

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

One of the traps or the pitfalls of writing a trilogy - or a triptych, or whatever term you want to use - is that the second book can be a long second act to get you from book one to book three, which borrows all of its energy from the first book.

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

I was very much a child of the Cold War.

And I had always liked vampire stories because they are great material that can be refashioned in lots of ways.

That literary-popular distinction is, in my view, vastly overstated. At the far poles there are clearly books that are purely commercial and purely literary, written for audiences that want to see the same thing enacted over and over and over again. But the middle is where most people read and most people write.

When you write, you take the ball and you hold it up to the light and you turn it slowly, and let people draw their own conclusions. And try to bring empathy to all sides of the equation.

Writing is a job: you must show up.

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.

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

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'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.

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.

My rule has always been, write the next part of the book that you seem to know well. So I won't necessarily write chapter two after chapter one.

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.

What strange places our lives can carry us to, what dark passages.

It happened fast. Thirty-two minutes for one world to die, another to be born.

It was possible, he understood, for a person's life to become just a long series of mistakes, and that the end, when it came, was just one more mistake in a chain of bad choices. The thing was, most of these mistakes were actually borrowed from other people. You took their bad ideas, and for whatever reason, made them your own.

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

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

This ravishing world. This achingly bittersweet, ravishing world.

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.

Because that's what heaven is...it's opening the door of a house in twilight and everyone you love is there.

The fact is, there's a great deal of hair-splitting fussiness when it comes to fly-fishing, most of it as silly as a top hat.

He breathed once more, holding the air in his chest, as if it were not air but something more--a sweet taste of freedom, of all cares lifted, everything over and done.

As long as we remember a person, they're not really gone. Their thoughts, their feelings, their memories, they become a part of us.

A thousand recollected lives were passing through her, a thousand stories - of love and work, of parents and children, of duty and joy and grief. Beds slept in and meals eaten, and the bliss and pain of the body, and a view of summer leaves from a window on a morning it had rained; the nights of loneliness and the nights of love, the soul in it's body keeping always longing to be known.

It was what you did, Wolgast understood; you started to tell a story about who you were, and soon enough the lies were all you had and you became that person.

Rust, corrosion, wind, rain. The nibbling teeth of mice and the acrid droppings of insects and the devouring jaws of years. The was of nature upon machines, of the planet's chaotic forces upon the works of humankind. The energy that man had pulled from the earth was being inexorably pulled back into it, sucked like water down a drain. Before long, if it hadn't happened already, not a single high-tension pole would be left standing on the earth. Mankind had built a world that would take a hundred years to die. A century for the last light to go out.

We live, we die. Somewhere along the way, if we're lucky, we may find someone to help lighten the load.

She remembered no one at all. She remembered one day thinking: I am alone. There is no I but I. She lived in the dark. She taught herself to walk in the light, though it was not easy.

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.

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.

Before she became the Girl from Nowhere-the One Who Walked In, the First and Last and Only, who lived a thousand years-she was just a little girl in Iowa, named Amy. Amy Harper Bellafonte.

Here she was, a women who could bolt-load a crossbow in under a second, put half a dozen long arrows in the air in fewer than five, blade a target dead through the sweet spot at six meters, on the run, on an off day; and yet knitting a pair of baby booties seemed completely beyond her power.

The sadness you feel is not your own. It's his sadness you feel in your heart, Amy, for missing you.