"We never know which lives we influence, or when, or why."

"I'm not much of a believer in the so-called character study; I think that in the end, the story should always be the boss."

"Schizoid behavior is a pretty common thing in children. It's accepted, because all we adults have this unspoken agreement that children are lunatics."

"The sky of the color of ashes in the east and embers in the west."

"I knew there were no ghosts in there, but on the other hand, what if there were?"

"The world has given me a good life since then, I won't deny it, but sometimes I hate the world, anyway. Dick Cheney, that apologist for water boarding and for too long chief preacher in the Holy Church of Whatever it Takes, got a brand-new heart while I was writing this - how about that? He lives on; other people have died."

"I'm a salami writer. I try to write good salami but salami is salami."

"Until we see each other again, keep your head together, read some good books, be useful, be happy."

"He felt gladness roar through his soul."

"The most important things are the hardest things to say. They are the things you get ashamed of because words diminish your feelings - words shrink things that seem timeless when they are in your head to no more than living size when they are brought out."

"The perception of a child who has not yet learned to protect itself by developing the tunnel vision that keeps out ninety percent of the universe."

"Memory is the basis of every journey."

"You must be human . . . how weirdly exotic and excitingly perverse."

"I changed it. I had to. Do you know why?" She studied him, her eyes grave. "Because that was then and this is now. Because the past is gone, even though it defines the present."

"Description begins in the writer's imagination, but should finish in the reader's."

"The scariest moment is always just before you start."

"If you fell outward to the limit of the universe, would you find a board fence and signs reading DEAD END? No. You might find something hard and rounded, as the chick must see the egg from the inside. And if you should peck through that shell (or find a door), what great and torrential light might shine through your opening at the end of space? Might you look through and discover our entire universe is but part of one atom on a blade of grass? Might you be forced to think that by burning a twig you incinerate an eternity of eternities? That existence rises not to one infinite but to an infinity of them?"

"Remember, Hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies."

"We'll eat your steam and lap up your blood. But first, we'll drink your screams."

"He felt more crypts cracking open inside of him; the stench he smelled was not decayed bodies but decayed memories, and that was somehow worse."

"When you write, you want to get rid of the world, do you not? Of course you do. When you're writing, you're creating your own worlds."

"Without story books is like a person with no soul."

"It's about getting up, getting well, and getting over. Getting happy, okay? Getting happy."

"To write is human, to edit is divine."

"Eddie discovered one of his childhood's great truths. Grownups are the real monsters, he thought."

"But if you needed to HAVE AN IDEA, boredom could be to a roadblocked novel what chemotherapy was to a cancer patient."

"What I'd show you is much more bizarre than anything we have looked at so far, and I warn you in advance that the first impulse will be to laugh. That's all right. Laugh if you must. Just don't take your eye off what you see, for even in your imagination, here is a creature who can do you damage."

"The trap had a ghastly perfection."

"Friendships founded on laughter are always fortuitous."

"I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was 12 - Jesus, did you?"

"Go then, there are other worlds than these."

"One of his followers murmured agreement, but another quietly slipped away. Now there was Norton and four others. Maybe that wasn't so bad. Christ Himself could only find twelve."

"Sorry is the Kool-Aid of human emotions. It's what you say when you spill a cup of coffee or throw a gutter ball when you're bowling with the girls in the league. True sorrow is as rare as true love."

"The woman who preaches has poison religion. Let the respectable ones go."

"The late afternoon sunlight, warm as oil, sweet as childhood ..."

"Four young men in motorcycle jackets... set upon the man in khaki shorts and beat him unconscious with his own sandwich board."

"I never think of stories as made things; I think of them as found things. As if you pull them out of the ground, and you just pick them up. Someone once told me that that was me low-balling my own creativity. That might or might not be the case. But still, on the story I am working on now, I do have some unresolved problem. It doesn't keep me awake at nights. I feel like when it comes down, it will be there..."

"Outside, daylight was bleeding slowly toward dusk."

"Nothing is ever lost, Sarah. Nothing that can't be found."

"There's no tonic like an old friend."

"It was easier to be brave when you were someone else."

"There was an ocean above us, held in by a thin sac that might rupture and let down a flood at any second."

"It don't matter if you believe in God Nick, he believes in you."

"Paths cross all the time in this world of our, sometimes in the strangest places."

"In a democracy we sometimes have to put up with things we don't life or approve of."

"Give me just enough information so that I can lie convincingly."

"Denigrating free will by confusing it with ka was worse than blasphemy, it was tiresome and stupid."

"Murder is like potato chips: you can't stop with just one."

"The past is obdurate."

"Life is like a wheel. Sooner or later, it always come around to where you started again."