"We all have strategies to distract ourselves from what we cannot bear. Memory, for example, serves such a function."
- Paul Park
"Every character in a story, I thought when I had folded up the phone, has both a purpose and a secret purpose."
"And you’re disappointed in the story. I know you wanted a love story."
"I thought you could build a story that would function as a machine or else a complex of machines, each one moving separately, yet part of a process that ultimately would produce an emotion or a sequen..."
"The heroine might be unsure. And the reader. But I don’t think the author should be."
"There’s nothing cruel about a vampire or a parasite, she said."
"That’s why it’s difficult to write about your own life. Any distortion feels like a betrayal."
"Fear is the most devastating of all human emotions. Man has no trouble like the paralyzing effects of fear."
- Paul Parker