Quotes

I'd already been reading Emil Cioran for years and consider him one of my all-time favorite and, oddly, most nourishing writers. As an aphorist, Cioran has no rivals other than perhaps Nietzsche, and many of his philosophies are echoed by Ligotti. But Ligotti is far more disturbing than Cioran, who is actually very funny. In exploring these philosophies, nobody I've read has expressed the idea of humanity as aberration more powerfully than Cioran and Ligotti.[2014]

And if we're talking about hard-boiled detectives, too, what could be more hardboiled than the worldview of Ligotti or Cioran? They make the grittiest of crime writers seem like dilettantes. Next to "The Conspiracy Against the Human Race," Mickey Spillane seems about as hard-boiled as bubble gum.[2014]

If you want to be a writer, stop being a personal assistant!

If you believe in a personal god who has a destiny for everyone, well then your just a character in his story.

I think there's dangerous people in the world, and that dangerous people are often called upon to combat them.

{On pitching True Detective (2014)}"Nobody was going to let me make a TV series that was just about two men riding around talking, so I put a murder in there."

The public fascination with serial killers has almost turned them into comic-book villains, and I wanted a killer whose story was not so complicated that unraveling it was going to take up our all of our time. The more simple and solid your plot is, the more free you are to explore ways of telling that haven't been tried yet.