Math was always my best subject growing up.

A Head Full of Ghosts' was my first full horror novel, and that felt like coming home as a writer.

After my debut didn't go very well with Holt, I needed to be in a healthier head space. I was happy to emerge from there. You will always have those negative thoughts as a writer, but you can't let them take over. If you let them take over, those are the real page killers.

As an adult, I've learned to cope and pull the plug on the worst what-ifs before my mind takes me to a place from which I can't return.

The single best thing is, family comes first. Over everything. I can't think of anything that has been more pervasive and played a larger part in my life than that simple lesson.

Cross cultural experience teaches us not simply that people have different beliefs, but that people seek meaning and understand themselves in some sense as members of a cosmos ruled by God.

I think a lot of people mistake my confidence on stage for cockiness in real life, and that's actually farthest from the truth. When I'm on stage, I'm that confident and that cocky because I have a microphone in my hand, and there's a few thousand people staring at me. And I know they're there to laugh.

In the last analysis, the individual person is responsible for living his own life and for 'finding himself.' If he persists in shifting his responsibility to somebody else, he fails to find out the meaning of his own existence.