Justin Cronin Quotations

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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

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.