"You cannot hope to sweep someone else away by the force of your writing until it has been done to you."

"The first draft of a book-even a long one-should take no more than three months, the length of a season."

"Most kids don't give a hoot in hell for brains; they go a penny a pound, and the kid with the high I.Q. who can't play baseball or at least come in third in the local circle jerk is everybody's fifth wheel."

"You pay for what you get, you own what you pay for... and sooner or later whatever you own comes back home to you."

"Might as well try to drink the ocean with a spoon as argue with a lover."

"Good description is a learned skill, one of the prime reasons why you cannot succeed unless you read a lot and write a lot. It's not just a question of how-to, you see; it's also a question of how much to. Reading will help you answer how much, and only reams of writing will help you with the how. You can learn only by doing."

"As a young man just beginning to publish some short fiction in the t&a magazines, I was fairly optimistic about my chances of getting published; I knew that I had some game, as the basketball players say these days, and I also felt that time was on my side; sooner or later the best-selling writers of the sixties and seventies would either die or go senile, making room for newcomers like me."

"Friends don't spy; true friendship is about privacy, too."

"In the end, we wear out our worries."

"We'll just have to get along. That's what people do, you know? They just get along. And try to help each other."

"I never grew up all at once. I did it one place and another along the way."

"And now, all these years later, it seem to him that the most horrible fact of human existence was that broken hearts mended."

"There are books full of great writing that don't have very good stories. Read sometimes for the story... don't be like the book-snobs who won't do that. Read sometimes for the words--the language. Don't be like the play-it-safers who won't do that. But when you find a book that has both a good story and good words, treasure that book."

"But in high school the business of irrevocable choices began. Doors slipped shut with a faint locking click that was only heared clearly in the dreams of later years."

"Pain rises. From the heart to the head pain rises."

"Why does she have to be such a...such a..."Go on," I said. "The truth is never cussing, Son."Such a bitch!"

"I will scream as the sanity leaves my mind forever. I will scream...but there is no one there to hear me."

"I felt lonely and content at the same time. I believe that is a rare kind of happiness."

"In the end it was Tabby who cast the deciding vote, as she so often has at crucial moments in my life. I'd like to think I've done the same for her from time to time, because it seems to me that one of the things marriage is about is casting the tiebreaking vote when you just can't decide what you should do next."

"What we like to think of ourselves and what we really are rarely have much in common...."

"Time passed: the mind rebuilds it's defenses."

"Stop now before i kill youa word to the wise from your friendPENNYWISE."

"What are you?''I'm the Turtle, son. I made the universe, but please don't blame me for it; I had a bellyache."

"There came a time when you realised that moving on was pointless. That you took yourself with you wherever you went."

"And what would they find on sale? His sanity? Could be. Half-Price. Smoke and Water Damage. Everything Must Go."

"Because that was then and this is now. Because the past is gone, even though it defines the present."

"Nothing lasts forever,' Richie repeated. He looked up at Bill, and Bill saw tears cut slowly through the dirt on Richie's cheeks.'Except maybe for love,' Ben said.'And desire,' Beverly said."

"About halfway through I broke down crying, which I hadn't expected. I was a little ashamed, but only a little;it was her, you see, and she never taxed me with the times that I slipped from the way I thought a man should be...the way I thought I should be, at any rate. A man with a good wife is the luckiest of God's creatures, and one without must be among the most miserable, I think, the only true blessing of their lives that they don't know how poorly off they are."

"It's like practicing pole vaulting your entire life, and then getting to the olympics and saying, 'what the hell did I want to jump over this stupid bar for?"

"He had been (Thinking? Praying?) It was all the same thing."

"Yeah, but what if you went back and killed your own grandfather?"He stared at me, baffled. "Why the fuck would you do that?"

"There's nothing I like better than a good book discussion with someone who can hold up his end of the argument."

"If you intend to write as truthfully as you can, your days as a member of polite society are numbered."

"He's my cat! He's not God's cat! Let God have his own cat! Let God have all the damn old cats He wants, and kill them all! Church is mine!"

"He said it was as if Tommy had produced a key which fit a cage in the back of his mind, a cage like his own cell. Only instead of holding a man, that cage held a tiger, and that tiger's name was Hope. Williams produced the key that unlocked the cage and the tiger was out, willy-nilly, to roam his brain."

"I believe instinct's the iron skeleton under all our ideas of free will. Unless you're willing to take the pipe or eat the gun or take a long walk off a short dock, you can't say no to some things. You can't refuse to pick up your option because there is no option."

"Andy Dufresne: 'That's the beauty of music. They can't get that from you...haven't you ever felt that way about music?'Red: 'I played a mean harmonica as a younger man. Lost interest in it though. Didn't make much sense in here.'Andy: 'Here's where it makes the most sense. You need it so you don't forget.' Red: 'Forget?'Andy: 'Forget that...there are places in this world that aren't made out of stone. That there's something inside...that they can't get to, that they can't touch. That's yours.'Red: 'What're you talking about?'Andy: 'Hope."

"If God gives you something you can do, why in God's name wouldn't you do it?"

"A little arrogance (or even a lot) isn't such a bad thing, although your mother undoubtedly told you different. Mine did. "Pride goeth before a fall, Stephen", she said... and then I found out - right around the age that is 19 x 2 - that eventually you fall down, anyway."

"Mr Gray didn't care much for Jonesy's body (or so he told himself; in truth it was hard not to feel at least some affection for something capable of providing such unexpected pleasures as 'bacon' and 'murder'), but it did have to take him another couple of hundred miles."

"And the shooting will happen so fast and be over so quick that you'll wonder what all the planning and palaver was for, when in the end it always comes down to the same five minutes' worth of blood, pain, and stupidity."

"Bad news should always come after lunch.. first thing in the morning everything left a bruise."

"All right. Here's the deal, bigshot: suck my cock. Do that and I'll let you go. Straight trade."He unzipped his fly and pulled down the elastic front of his shorts. Something that looked like a dead whitesnake fell out. Johnny observed the thin stream of blood driz-zling from it without surprise. The cop was bleeding from every other orifice, wasn't he?"Speaking in the literature sense," the cop said, grinning, "this particular blowjob is going to be a little more Anne Rice than Armistead Maupin. I suggest you follow Queen Victoria's advice - close your eyes and think of strawberry shortcake."

"The town knew about darkness. It knew about the darkness that comes on the land when rotation hides the land from the sun, and about the darkness of the human soul. The town is an accumulation of three parts which, in sum, are greater than the sections. The town is the people who live there, the buildings which they have erected to den or do business in, and it is the land."

"Good books are for consideration after, too."

"We've switched from a culture that was interested in manufacturing, economics, politics - trying to play a serious part in the world - to a culture that's really entertainment-based."

"The reason authors almost always put a dedication on a book is, because their selfishness even horrifies themselves in the end."

"By the time he was done with the deer it had been dark three hours and his bad leg was singing 'Ave Maria'."

"Most people are sheep and sheep don't eat meat."

"By the time I was fourteen the nail in my wall would no longer support the weight of the rejection slips impaled upon it. I replaced the nail with a spike and went on writing."