Justin Cronin
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.Collection: Beauty
And I grew up on a steady diet of science fiction, especially apocalyptic and postapocalyptic fiction.Collection: Diet
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.Collection: War
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.Collection: Book
Behind every writer stands a very large bookshelf.Collection: Behinds
We live, we die. Somewhere along the way, if we're lucky, we may find someone to help lighten the load.Collection: Lucky
On a fading summer evening, late in the last hours of his old life, Peter Jaxon-son of Demetrius and Prudence Jaxon, First Family; descendent of Terrence Jaxon, signatory of the One Law; great-great-nephew of the one known as Auntie, Last of the First; Peter of Souls, the Man of Days and the One Who Stood-took his position on the catwalk above Main Gate, waiting to kill his brother.Collection: Summer
What strange places our lives can carry us to, what dark passages.Collection: Dark
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.Collection: Rain
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.Collection: Book
This ravishing world. This achingly bittersweet, ravishing world.Collection: World
Even on the darkest night, my friend, life will have its way.Collection: Night
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.Collection: Dark
Because that's what heaven is...it's opening the door of a house in twilight and everyone you love is there.Collection: Twilight
As long as we remember a person, they're not really gone. Their thoughts, their feelings, their memories, they become a part of us.Collection: Memories
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.Collection: Worry
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.Collection: Summer
One of the great themes in American literature is the individual's confrontation with the vast open spaces of the continent.Collection: Space
It's different being afraid when there's the hope it will amount to something.Collection: Different
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.Collection: Children
It happened fast. Thirty-two minutes for one world to die, another to be born.Collection: Two
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.Collection: Strange Places
I like to break left when people think I'm going to go right.Collection: Thinking
Choosing writing as a career, just by itself, is a measure of not being a calculating person.Collection: Writing
I like creating villains.Collection: Creating
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.Collection: Light
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.Collection: Running
In her mind's eye she saw it, saw it all at last: the rolling armies and the flames of battle; the graves and pits and dying cries of a hundred million souls; the spreading darkness, like a black wing stretching over the earth; the last, bitter hours of cruelty and sorrow, and the terrible, final flights; death's great dominion over all, and, at the last, empty cities, becalmed by the silence of a hundred years. Already these things were coming to pass.Collection: Eye
Writing is a job: you must show up.Collection: Jobs
Sara waited a respectful time, knowing there was nothing she could do to ease the woman's pain. Grief was a place, Sara understood, where a person went alone. It was like a room without doors, and what happened in that room, all the anger and the pain you felt, was meant to stay there, nobody's business but yours.Collection: Pain
A baby was a fact. It was a being with a mind and a nature, and you could feel about it any way you liked, but a baby wouldn't care. Just by existing, it demanded that you believe in a future: the future it would crawl in, walk in, live in. A baby was a piece of time; it was a promise you made that the world made back to you.Collection: Baby
There was something in the pages of these books that had the power to make him feel better about things, a life raft to cling to before the dark currents of memory washed him downstream again, and on brighter days, he could even see himself going on this way for some time. A small but passable life. And then, of course, the end of the world happened.Collection: Memories
Kittredge had obviously misjudged her, but he had learned that was the way with most people. The story was never the story, and it surprised you, how much another person could carry.Collection: People
Real courage is doing the right thing when nobody's looking. Doing the unpopular thing because it's what you believe, and the heck with everybody.Collection: Courage
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.Collection: Would Be
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.Collection: Long
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.Collection: Moving
And I had always liked vampire stories because they are great material that can be refashioned in lots of ways.Collection: Vampire
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.Collection: Book
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.Collection: Book
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.Collection: Lying
I was a 'Planet of the Apes'-obsessed kid.Collection: Kids
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.Collection: Sweet
I was very much a child of the Cold War.Collection: Children
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.Collection: Stars
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.Collection: Girl
The sadness you feel is not your own. It's his sadness you feel in your heart, Amy, for missing you.Collection: Heart
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.Collection: Dark
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.Collection: Mistake
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.Collection: Girl