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The one thing I've learned exploring the deep is that you just can't even begin to imagine some of the bizarre creatures that are down there.

Visual storytelling of one kind or another has been around since cavemen were drawing on the walls.

Rotgut was, to me, just this way to get into the underground of Manhattan where you have these little pockets a villain could rise from; a rot in the bowels of Manhattan. It led to these stories that were just very creepy.

What was once underground is now coming to the surface.

Stories of all lengths and depths come from different parts of the cave. For a novel, you must lay in mental, physical and spiritual provision as for a siege or for a time of hectic explosions, while a short story is, or can be, a steady, timed flame like the lighting of a blow lamp on a building site full of dry tinder.

Just under the surface I shall be, all together at first, then separate and drift, through all the earth and perhaps in the end through a cliff into the sea, something of me. A ton of worms in an acre, that is a wonderful thought, a ton of worms, I believe it.

'The Lair of the White Worm' is quite a strange film. It's difficult to be good when you're saying lines that have been translated from Spanish to English by someone who speaks French.

It is the test of a novel writer's art that he conceal his snake-in-the-grass; but the reader may be sure that it is always there.

I opened up every can of worms I could. I got to the place where I would peel back one layer, and then another layer, and the stuff that would come up underneath was so inspiring, it made me want to write about it.

The soles of the best writers, a professor once told me, are worn down to holes. This is an incomplete measure, but the image of a writer grinding his or her shoes against curbs and cobblestones stuck with me. The story is always out there, the details around the corner or down the alley.