"It was as if the body disdained memory... or refused the responsibility of it."

"I am always chilled and astonished by the would-be writers who ask me for advice and admit, quite blithely, that they "don't have time to read." This is like a guy starting up Mount Everest saying that he didn't have time to buy any rope or pitons."

"Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration, the rest of us just get up and go to work."

"When you write a book, you spend day after day scanning and identifying the trees. When you're done, you have to step back and look at the forest."

"FEAR stands for face everything and recover " Old AA saying."

"The way those old memories kept bubbling to the surface in the present tense was disturbing. It was as if the past had never died; as if on some level of time's great tower, everything was still happening."

"Things conceived by minds and made by hands can never be quite the same, even if they try their best to be identical, because they're never the same from day to day or even moment to moment."

"He died with his tie on. Do you think that could be our generation's equivalent of that old saying about dying with your boots on? Harry Blakemoor died with his tie on. I like it, Larry."

"Talent is cheaper than table salt. What separates the talented individual from the successful one is a lot of hard work."

"He sometimes believed that the compulsion to make fiction was no more than a bulwark against confusion, maybe even insanity. It was a desperate imposition of order by people able to find that precious stuff only in their minds . . . never in their hearts."

"He supposed that even in Hell, people got an occasional sip of water, if only so they could appreciate the full horror of unrequited thirst when it set in again."

"Your man Jesus seems to me a bit of a son of a bitch when it comes to women, Roland said. Was He ever married? The corners of Callahan's mouth quirked. No he said, but His girlfriend was a whore. Well, Roland said, that's a start. "

"God is cruel. Sometimes he makes you live."

"Wanting more is just a recipe for heartache."

"And this wasn't lying, not really. It was leaving out."

"I hope he died of intestinal cancer in a part of the world where morphine is as of yet undiscovered."

"When teenagers aren't turning like weathervanes in a high wind, they're as stiff as Puritans."

"You learned to accept, or you ended up in a small room writing letters home with Crayolas."

"A book is like a pump. It gives nothing unless first you give to it. You prime a pump with your own water, you work the handle with your own strength. You do this because you expect to get back more than you give."

"A mob always picked its own leaders, and it always picked the right ones."

"Every book you pick up has its own lesson or lessons, and quite often the bad books have more to teach than the good ones."

"She could smell damprot, high, sweet, and cloying. She could smell madness like dead vegetables in a dark cellar."

"If a book is not alive in the writer's mind, it is as dead as year-old horse-shit."

"Men who find themselves late are never sure. They are all the things the civics books tell us the good citizen should be: partisans but never zealots, respectors of the facts which attend each situation but never benders of those facts, uncomfortable in positions of leadership but rarely unable to turn down a responsibility once it has been offered . . . or thrust upon them. They make the best leaders in a democracy because they are unlikely to fall in love with power."

"In the years since, I've discovered there's a lot to be said for boredom."

"People who leave their drugs in a bathroom the guests use are just asking for trouble."

"You always know the truth, because when you cut yourself or someone else with it, there's always a bloody show."

"A few of the gunslingers dance, but only a few. And they were the young ones. The other ones only sat, and it seemed to me they were half embarrassed in all that light, that civilized light."

"It was really amazing the number of hard hits from which a mind could recover."

"It was how wars really ended, Dieffenbaker supposed -- not at truce tables but in cancer wards and office cafeterias and traffic jams. Wars died one tiny piece at a time, each piece something that fell like a memory, each lost like an echo that fades in winding hills. In the end even war ran up the white flag. Or so he hoped. He hoped that in the end even war surrendered."

"I guess a sock is also a geometric shape-technically-but I don't know what you'd call it. A socktagon?"

"Why' is a crooked letter and can't be made straight."

"Anyway, as the old barrelhouse song says, My God, how the money rolled in. Norton must have subscribed to the old Puritan notion that the best way to figure out which folks God favours is by checking their bank acounts."

"Wendy? Darling? Light, of my life. I'm not gonna hurt ya. I'm just going to bash your brains in."

"It's a mystery. That's the first thing that interests me about the idea of God. If there is one, it's mysterious and powerful and awesome to even consider the concept, and you have to take it seriously."

"The exhilaration was hard to explain. It was a lonely feeling - a somehow melancholy feeling. He was outside; he passed on the wings of the wind, and none of the people beyond the brightly lighted squares of their windows saw him. They were inside, inside where there was light and warmth. They didn't know he had passed them; only he knew. It was a secret thing."

"By definition, though, we are family. And in difficult times-- times like these-- despite our differences, we stand together as family."

"Later, with strange galaxies turning in slow gavotte overhead, neither thought the act of love had ever been so sweet, so full."

"Be sure your sin will find you out...Be sure."

"Do any men grow up or do they only come of age?"

"He removed his unvaluable valuables and dumped his shirt, pants, and skivvies into a letter slot."

"The more you read, the less apt you are to make a fool of yourself with your pen or word processor."

"His story is simple, because simple is always best."

"I hate the assumption that you can't write about something because you haven't experienced it, and not just because it assumes a limit on the human imagination, which is basically limitless. It also suggests that some leaps of identification are impossible. I refuse to accept that, because it leads to the conclusion that real change is beyond us, and so is empathy."

"What none of them knew, of course, was that Carrie White was telekinetic."

"The world was full of monsters, and they were all allowed to bite the innocent and the unwary."

"Shit. The mind gets up to funny tricks, doesn't it? Shadows grow faces."

"And people who don't dream, who don't have any kind of imaginative life, they must they must go nuts. I can't imagine that."

"We make up horrors to help us cope with the real ones."

"I am not the potter, not the potter's wheel, but the potter's clay; is not the value of the shape attained as dependent upon the intrinsic worth of the clay as upon the wheel and the Master's skill?"