Michael Koryta Quotes

We find people of value,' she said, speaking like a teacher addressing a small child, 'and we determine what story they need to hear. It's the story that they're already telling themselves, don't you see? It's the nightmare they believe in. Once you understand that nightmare, you join them in it. Their fear becomes your fear. It's all a shared experience then. And once you have that, once they feel that is the truth, all the way down to their core, then your coping strategy becomes theirs. It's a natural progression. This is the power of a shared narrative. Of the echo chamber.

We understand tornadoes scientifically, but it still feels supernatural. The randomness makes it feel supernatural.

To weep not for the way things had once been but for the way things had been supposed to go and did not. People believed that they were haunted by bad memories, but that wasn't the truth. The most sinister hauntings were from unrealized futures.

I'd worked at a small town newspaper, and I was thinking of all the strange stories that I had seen float through the newsroom in my time there that were dismissed as kind of amusing curiosities. Somehow from that I got to this idea of an eccentric alcoholic who built a lighthouse in the woods.

Band of Skulls is joining Cage the Elephant as my new musical caffeine.

It was all about size now: the big ran the world on the sweat of the small, and if the big faltered for any reason, the small were the first to go.

You're too worried about figuring out what you can believe about all of this, and then figuring out how to control it. That's how most people approach their lives. Way I feel, though, after a lot of years of living? Not much of what matters in the world is under your control. You don't dictate, you adapt. That's all. So stop trying to control this, and start trying to listen to what it's telling you.

There are different layers of honesty - the truth of what you said and the truth of what was in your heart when you spoke the words.

You became what you wanted to become. That's what Ezra believe. You could become it if you tried hard enough, could take what you really were and change it, force-feed yourself a new life until it became your old life, too, blurred together until a better self emerged.

So much water. It just went on and on and on, a sight that squeezed the soul. He felt so damn small out here. And that felt good. Maybe that was strange, but it felt good. He was insignificant. The world was too big to care about his decisions. There was no weight here, no burden.

What still blew them all away was time itself, the days and months and the years, oh yes, the years. They went faster than anything man had the capacity to invent, so fast that for a while they fooled you into thinking they were slow, and was there any crueler trick than that?

based on what the wind does, we build

For 'So Cold the River,' I'm actually working on adapting the book with Scott Silver, who was just nominated for an Oscar for 'The Fighter,' and who also wrote '8 Mile,' which I think is a terrific screenplay. The chance to work with Scott is a tremendous pleasure and I'm learning a lot.

I would say of characters I've created, the one I've felt the most connected to emotionally was Adam Austin from 'The Prophet.' I think it was the connection to the idea that one decision you make innocently enough can have very serious, drastic consequences for someone else's life.

What I like about writing a stand alone novel is you're starting with a fresh world and fresh characters. Part of what I love about writing is that journey of discovery where it's all new to me as well.

In terms of characters I wish I had created - just because I haven't dealt with anything like them - I'm really impressed by characters who can endure over time, whether that be a long series run like a Harry Bosch, or a character who endures over generations and continues to please readers: Sherlock Holmes.

Stephen King, by far, is the standard-bearer. I think anyone who writes suspense fiction and says that King isn't an influence is either lying or being foolish. I read his book 'On Writing' before I read pretty much any of his fiction.

When you read a supernatural suspense story or a ghost story, or a horror story, the evil at play is something that you can dismiss. And I wonder if, in this time, if people really want to be sitting on the subway reading a book about someone releasing a dirty bomb on the subway.

I finished my first novel - it was around 300 pages long - when I was 16. Wrote one more before I got out of high school, then wrote the first Lincoln Perry novel when I was 19. It didn't sell, but I liked the character and I knew the world so I tried what was, in my mind, a sequel. Wrote that when I was 20, and that one made it.

I made a very conscious effort to finish 'The Cypress House' before 'So Cold the River' launched, because I thought that would help build a buffer between my writing and any impact that came from either the success or the failure of that first book.

Horror and supernatural novels give you a lot of what you look for in a crime novel, just with a twist that was very fresh for me as a reader.

'Envy the Night' was my first stand alone, the first book I'd written in the third person and I loved the feel of that, and it was different but it was also the same. 'So Cold the River,' I knew, was going to be really different, and that's why I thought about doing it as a novella under a pseudonym, because I didn't want to damage my career.

Ultimately, in my mind, that's what I'm trying to do with my fiction; I'm trying to transport my reader into a different world.

You have bound us, Kimble imagined saying, to an evil world. Where's the love in that? And in that scenario, God always answered, Temporarily bound you, yes. Now, during your time in that evil world, did you do anything to help?