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The first books I remember having an impact on me when I was a kid were L. Frank Baum's 'Oz' books, which were much stranger than the movie: at once rather whimsical and really dark.

I've always been interested in violence, even as a teenager. I loved 'Helter Skelter' and books like that.

I've always been a big fan of books.

I still feel, as I did when I was six or seven, that books are simply the best way to experience a story.

It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive.

My most successful books, the ones that I feel the strongest about, are the ones that started with a premise that for me was deeply emotional.

While books provided me with some escape from the mental and physical horrors of my early life, they were unreliable. Many times the protagonists suffered terribly and then died at the end.

I don't reread my books after they're published, because it's agony.

I first read 'An American Tragedy' in college, and in my entire life I had never read anything so painful.