"What you love, you must love all the harder because someday it will be gone."

"She ran out of her marriage the way a woman can run out of a pair of sandals when she decides to let go and really dash."

"It would not do to tell other people, not just because they wouldn't believe but because they wouldn't care."

"A person can go along quite awhile if they get a good day every once and again."

"He thought that fat boys were probably only allowed to love pretty girls inside. If he told anyone how he felt (not that he had anyone to tell), that person would probably laugh until he had a heart-attack."

"You've got to go to Boston, and you've got to go there NOW!!"

"For a woman a man will do many things that he'd turn his back on in an instant when alone; things he'd back away from, nine times out of ten, even when drunk adn with a bunch of his friends egging him on."

"Kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler's heart, kill your darlings."

"It's best to have your tools with you. If you don't, you're apt to find something you didn't expect and get discouraged."

"We have once again succeeded in destroying what we could not create."

"A left turn meant life - if you called what went on in the sunbaked exercise yard life, and many did; many lived it for years, with no apparent ill effects."

"Remember Stephen King's First Rule of Writers and Agents, learned by bitter personal experience: You don't need one until you're making enough for someone to steal ... and if you're making that much, you'll be able to take your pick of good agents."

"When asked, "How do you write?" I invariably answer, "one word at a time.""

"You stole my story and something's got to be done about it."

"Donald Trump is worse than any horror story I've written."

"Working with him was sort of like trying to defuse a bomb with somebody standing behind you and every now and then clashing a pair of cymbals together. In a word, upsetting."

"Dead people put on weight, it seems to me; both in their flesh and in our minds, they put on weight."

"What he knows now is that guilt isn't the only reason people commit suicide. Sometimes you can just get bored with afternoon TV."

"Don't think I know you," Harold said, grinning, as they shook. He had a firm grip. Larry's hand was pumped up and down exactly three times and let go. It reminded Larry of the time he had shaken hands with George Bush back when the old bushwhacker had been running for President. It had been at a political rally, which he had attended on the advice of his mother, given many years ago. If you can't afford a movie, go to the zoo. If you can't afford the zoo, go see a politician."

"Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Fool me three times, shame on both of us."

"You can never be too thin or too rich. And if you don't believe it you were never really fat or really poor."

"Isn't bravery always sort of beautiful?"

"We fool ourselves so much we could do it for a living."

"You have come from the shadow of the heroin and the shadow of your brother, my friend. Come from the shadow of yourself, if you dare."

"I hated high school. I don't trust anybody who looks back on the years from 14 to 18 with any enjoyment. If you liked being a teenager, there's something wrong with you."

"Your stuff starts out being just for you, in other words, but then it goes out. Once you know what the story is and get it right - as right as you can, anyway - it belongs to anyone who wants to read it. Or criticize it. If you're very lucky...more will want to do the former than the latter."

"The most classic horror tale of this latter type is the Old Testament story of Job, who becomes human Astro-Turf in a kind of spiritual Superbowl between God and Satan."

"Can the future hsitory of the world be so fragile that it will not allow two high school teachers to meet and fall in love? To marry, to dance to Beatles tunes like "I Want to Hold Your Hand," and live unremarkable lives?"

"In nightmares we can think the worst. That's what they're for, I guess."

"When Annie's treatin, you best be eatin."

"Everyone- black as well as white- thinks it's going to be better over the next jump of land."

"I like to get ten pages a day, which amounts to 2,000 words. That's 180,000 words over a three-month span, a goodish length for a book - something in which the reader can get happily lost, if the tale is done well and stays fresh."

"Friends come in and out of our lives, like busboys in a restaurant."

"People who try hard to do the right thing always seem mad."

"If you don't have time to read, you don't have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that."

"Same shit, different day, he thinks, but now the joy is gone and the sadness is back, the sadness that feels like something deserved, the price of some not-quite-forgotten betrayal."

"He had a massive stroke. 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?"

"Better to be dirty than dead."

"No one can tell what goes on in between the person you were and the person you become. No one can chart that blue and lonely section of hell. There are no maps of the change. You just come out the other side.Or you don't."

"Time's the thief of memory."

"At the same moment a cold chill traced a finger down the middle of my back. Sometimes things come back to you, that's all. Sometimes they come back."

"He had discovered that there was not just one God but many, and some were more than cruel - they were insane, and that changed all. Cruelty, after all, was understandable. With insanity, however, there was no arguing."

"That- we seemed to have decided without saying a word- might go a long way toward spoiling something that was special, and beautiful, by virtue of its strangeness and delicacy."

"I have never felt like I was creating anything. For me, writing is like walking through a desert and all at once, poking up through the hardpan, I see the top of a chimney. I know there's a house under there, and I'm pretty sure that I can dig it up if I want. That's how I feel. It's like the stories are already there. What they pay me for is the leap of faith that says: "If I sit down and do this, everything will come out OK."

"You can, you should, and if you're brave enough to start, you will."

"A boy who once wiped his ass with poison ivy probably doesn't belong in a smart people's club."

"Maybe he sells fear because he's got nothing else to sell."

"Guys like Henry and his buddies were an accident waiting to happen, the little kids' version of floods or tornadoes or gallstones."

"Time takes it all, whether you want it to or not."

"This inhuman place makes human monsters."