"There's an old rule of theater that goes, 'If there's a gun on the mantel in Act I, it must go off in Act III.' The reverse is also true."

"Writing is the act of finding out what I think."

"A person can't change all at once."

"Time, Eddie had decided during this period, was in large part created by external events. When a lot of interesting shit was happening, time seemed to go by fast. If you got stuck with nothing but the usual boring shit, it slowed down. And when everything stopped happening, time apparently quit altogether. Just packed up and went to Coney Island. Weird but true."

"The concept of dreaming is known to the waking mind but to the dreamer there is no waking, no real world, no sanity; there is only the screaming bedlam of sleep."

"It starts with this: put your desk in the corner, and every time you sit down there to write, remind yourself why it isn't in the middle of the room. Life isn't a support system for art. It's the other way around."

"You need to take out the stuff that's just sitting there and doing nothing. No slackers allowed! All meat, no filler!"

"We was used to each other in the way I s'pose two old bats can get used to hangin upside-down next to each other in the same cave, even though they're a long way from what you'd call the best of friends."

"At its most basic we are only discussing a learned skill, but do we not agree that sometimes the most basic skills can create things far beyond our expectations? We are talking about tools and carpentry, about words and style...but as we move along, you'd do well to remember that we are also talking about magic."

"Seven, Richie thought. That's the magic number. There has to be seven of us. That's the way it's supposed to be."

"Friends and lovers lie endlessly, caught in the web of regard."

"Anything with the power to make you laugh over thirty years later isn't a waste of time. I think something like that is very close to immortality."

"He understood well enough how a man with a choice between pride and responsibility will almost always choose pride--if responsibility robs him of his manhood."

"Time takes it all in the end..."

"Deep inside her (ih her harrowed soul) she felt a glowing ember of fury at the man responsible for this. Tha man who had put her in this position. She looked at the pistol lying beside the basin, and knew that if he were here, she would use it on him without a moment's hesitation. Knowing that made her feel confused about herself. It also made her feel a little stronger."

"Jake guessed Henry had been pulling shit like this on him so long that Eddie only noticed it when Henry pulled it on someone else " someone like the blonde ticket-seller."

"If God rewards us on earth for good deeds-the Old Testament suggests it's so, and the Puritans certainly believed it-then maybe Satan rewards us for evil ones."

"She looked beautiful,standing there barefoot in her faded jeans. I wanted to take her in my arms, and lift her, and carry her into some untroubled future.Instead, I left her where she was. That's not the world we live in, she'd said, and how right she was."

"The dancing sickness took place during the latter part of the fifteenth century. Bubonic plague--the black death--decimated Europe near the end of the fourteenth. Whooping cough near the end of the seventeenth, and the first known outbreaks of influenza near the end of the nineteenth. We've become so used to the idea of the flu--it seems almost like the common cold to us, doesn't it?--that no one but the historians seem to know that a hundred years ago it didn't exist."

"And when there are enough outsiders together in one place, a mystic osmosis takes place and you're inside."

"The woman had looked into the abyss and then walked out across it."

"The sky was the yellow color of old cheese and the clouds flew across it, as if they had seen something horrifying in the desert wastes where they had so lately been."

"We're not quite ending where we began, but close enough.Close enough."

"It's the people who aren't scared who die young."

"I think that, even if we forget each other, we'll remember in our dreams."

"I've met talespinners before, Jake, and they're all cut more or less from the same cloth. They tell tales because they're afraid of life."

"There is no life here but the slow death of days, and so when the evil falls on the town, its coming seems almost preordained, sweet and morphic. It is almost as though the town knows the evil was coming and the shape it would take."

"Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule."

"My friend wants to get moving and so do I,' Eddie said. 'We've got miles to go yet.'I know that. It's on your face, son. Like a scar.'Eddie was fascinated by the idea of duty and ka as something that left a mark, something that might look like decoration to one eye and disfigurement to another. Outside, thunder cracked and lightning flashed."

"Talent is a wonderful thing, but it won't carry a quitter."

"I'm not asking you to come reverently or unquestioningly; I'm not asking you to be politically correct or cast aside your sense of humor (please God you have one). This isn't a popularity contest, it's not the moral Olympics, and it's not church. But it's Writing, damn it, not washing the car or putting on eyeliner. If you can take it seriously, we can do business. If you can't or won't, it's time for you to close the book and do something else. Wash the car, maybe."

"They had discovered one could grow as hungry for light as for food."

"I never saw any of my dad's stories. My mother said he had piles and piles of manuscripts."

"Those aren't doors, and they're not opening. Those are crypts, Richie. They're cracking open and the vampires you thought were dead are all flying out again."

"A bad song for a night such as this, mayhap, but her heart went its own way without much interest in what her head thought or wanted; always had."

"It was only later, replaying the scene in her mind again and again, that she began to believe it was the expression of a man who was methodically unplugging himself from reality, one cord at a time. The face of a man who was heading out of the blue and into the black."

"People are only rational on the surface."

"Language does not always have to wear a tie and lace-up shoes. The object of fiction isn't grammatical correctness but to make the reader welcome and then tell a story, to make him/her forget, whenever possible, that he/she is reading a story at all."

"We fall from womb to tomb, from one blackness and toward another, remembering little of the one and knowing nothing of the other ... except through faith."

"Description is what makes the reader a sensory participant in the story. Good description is a learned skill,one of the prime reasons 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 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."

"It's how we see the world that keeps the darkness beyond at bay. Keeps it from pouring through and devouring us. I think all of us might know that, way down deep."

"Shall there be truth between us, as two men? Not as friends, but as enemies and equals?"

"I wouldn't have missed a single minute of it, Not for the whole world."

"The exhausted mind is obsession's easiest prey."

"Some stuff has to be done even if there is a risk. That's the first important thing I ever found out I didn't find out from my mother."

"There were times . . . when it occurred to me that I was repeating my mother's life. Usually this thought struck me as funny. But if I happened to be tired, or if there were extra bills to pay and no money to pay them with, it seemed awful. I'd think 'This isn't the way our lives are supposed to be going.' Then I'd think 'Half the world has the same idea."

"It took me twenty years of living with my father to accept the idea that being good could be good enough."

"You lost your innocence when you grew up, all right, everyone knew that, but did you have to lose your hope, as well?"

"In a book, all would have gone according to plan... but life was so fucking untidy - what could you say for an existence where some of the most crucial conversations of your life took place when you needed to take a shit, or something? An existence where there weren't even any chapters?"

"This was it, he knew it, was sure of it, this was the door which would take him back."