The hardest thing writers have to do is figure out for themselves who they are. What should they be writing about? What stories should they be telling? What does writing mean to them? I didn't know the answers to those questions for a long, long time.

Blake Crouch

For every perfect little town, there's something ugly underneath. No dream without the nightmare.

Blake Crouch

halloween perfect dream

His experience, there was darkness everywhere human beings gathered. The way of the world. Perfection was a surface thing. The epidermis. Cut a few layers deep, you begin to see some darker shades. Cut to the bone - pitch black.

Blake Crouch

halloween cutting perfection

Never assume you know where someone else is coming from.

Blake Crouch

never-assume halloween assuming

So we all embark wondering what lies over the horizon, what’s around the next bend. And isn’t that, in the end, what drives us?

Blake Crouch

horizon next lying

Nature doesn't see things through the prism of good or bad. It rewards efficiency. That is the simplicity of evolution, matching design to environment.

Blake Crouch

rewards simplicity design

Like people would ever want to read books on an electronic screen.

Blake Crouch

want book people

If you let fear take hold, if you let it own you, your life ceases to be your own.

Blake Crouch

cease halloween ifs

I love taking a character and raining holy hell down on them and seeing how they respond, how they react. It's one of the things I do in almost all my books - my protagonist is put through a very stressful situation that tests their strength and their psychological acuity. That's one of the core components of who I am as a writer.

Blake Crouch

i-am strength love character

I always find out after the fact that the books I've been writing were actually some sort of therapy, some sort of, you know, self-examination that I had to write the book in order to complete.

Blake Crouch

know you writing book

Writing and producing television very much speaks to the extroverted part of my personality. I love collaboration, the joint effort of hundreds of people working together to create something. But the other part of who I am is extremely introverted. I love being alone and dreaming up ideas and writing novels.

Blake Crouch

i-am alone personality love

Love means home. It's where you're meant to be.

Blake Crouch

you meant-to-be home love

The more you study quantum mechanics, the more crazy and incomprehensible it becomes. You truly do need a Ph.D. in very high level math and science to understand it at a high, high level.

Blake Crouch

understand you crazy science

If I had to get lost in a fictional world? I would love to go with those Hemingway characters in 'The Sun Also Rises' when they go on that trip in Spain, and they go fishing. And they take the wine bottles, and they put them in the river.

Blake Crouch

river sun love world

'The Lord of the Rings,' obviously, had a huge, huge impact on me. I read a lot of 'Hardy Boys,' also. I liked the equation, that it was always the same but a little bit different. There's something comforting about those books.

Blake Crouch

something me always impact

I started writing really early on, and my brother Jordan was my first audience. I would come up with scary stories to tell him at bedtime.

Blake Crouch

tell audience brother writing

In terms of moments that pushed me toward becoming a writer... My parents, my wife, and my English teacher in the 8th grade were all hugely supportive at moments during my development as a writer that were critical, where I might have quit when things got too hard.

Blake Crouch

parents me wife teacher

I love to read the kind of books I write. Genre-breaking. Fresh-concept. World-building. My all-time top three authors would have to be Cormac McCarthy, Thomas Harris, and Pat Conroy.

Blake Crouch

books top three love

I love to hike, fly-fish, and ski in the mountains where I live in Colorado.

Blake Crouch

mountains live where love

I think the most fascinating thing in terms of relationships is imagining all the different variations that they could be.

Blake Crouch

relationships i-think think different

It's a scary, exhilarating thing to have your work adapted by someone else. There are so many ways it can go wrong or be a poor example of the underlying story.

Blake Crouch

story someone poor work