"Beating heroin is child's play compared to beating your childhood."

"I think part of being a parent is trying to kill your kids."

"When it comes to the past, everyone writes fiction."

"Dreams are a simple psychological emetic, and people who have them are more blessed than cursed."

"God, you had enough time to have been through it three times. You've been through my stuff. I bet you over and let one of you stick the world's longest finger up my ass. If a prostate check is an exam, that was a motherfucking safari. I was scared to look down. I thought I'd see that guy's finger nail sticking out of my cock."

"For me, that emotional payoff is what it's all about. I want you to laugh or cry when you read a story...or do both at the same time. I want your heart, in other words. If you want to learn something, go to school."

"If a fear cannot be articulated, it can't be conquered."

"He sat there studiously bent over his work (Bill saw him), which lay in a slant of crisp white winterlight, his face sober and absorbed, knowing that to be a librarian was to come as close as any human being can to sitting in the peak-seat of eternity's engine."

"What our parents tell us when we are small seldom goes ignored, no matter how foolish it may be."

"Prison Break is one of the craziest, most unpredictable roller-coaster rides on TV today."

"Few if any seemed to have grasped the Principle of Reality, new knowledge leads always to yet more awesome mysteries. Greater physiological knowledge of the brain makes the existence of the soul less possible yet more probable by the nature of the search."

"Some birds are not meant to be caged, that's all. Their feathers are too bright, their songs too sweet and wild."

"Close your eyes and click your heals three times...because there's no place like Dome."

"When an imaginative person gets into mental trouble, the line between seeming and being has a way of disappearing."

"I think that real friendship always makes us feel such sweet gratitude, because the world almost always seems like a very hard desert, and the flowers that grow there seem to grow against such high odds."

"And there he would either be mercifully annihilated or live forever, insane and yet conscious inside It's homicidal endless formless hungry being."

"If you've ever been homesick, or felt exiled from all the things and people that once defined you, you'll know how important welcoming words and friendly smiles can be."

"Most people are optimists, although they may claim they are not. People who call themselves realists are often the biggest optimists of all."

"Horace, like all dogs, heard dead-voices quite often, and sometimes saw their owners. The dead were all around, but living people saw them no more than they could smell most of the ten thousand aromas that surrounded them every minute of every day."

"Reading at meals is considered rude in polite society, but if you expect to succeed as a writer, rudeness should be the second-to-least of your concerns. The least of all should be polite society and what it expects."

"We each owe a death, there are no exceptions, I know that, but sometimes, oh God, the Green Mile is so long."

"It's better to be good than evil, but one achieves goodness at a terrific cost."

"It's a wholly illogical but nonetheless powerful belief that things will change for the better in a new place, that the urge to self-destruct will magically disappear."

"Oh no, praying is great, without it the thumbscrews and the Iron Maiden probably never would have been invented."

"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."

"What about reality, you ask? Well, as far as I'm concerned, reality can go take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut. I've never held much of a brief for reality, at least in my written work. All too often it is to the imagination what ash stakes are to vampires."

"Hi,' Jake said. 'I met you earlier today, but you were a lot younger then.' 'I was a lot younger ten minutes ago."

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

"You laugh because what's fearful and unknown is also what's funny, you laugh the way a small child will sometimes laugh and cry at the same time when a capering circus clown approaches, knowing it is supposed to be funny... but it is also unknown, full of the unknown's eternal power."

"Twas something else. I had come to hate her, you see. I had come to wish her dead, and that was what held me back."

"Well, luck is for fools. It's all they have to hope for, poor devils."

"A man who loves money is a bastard, someone to be hated. A man who can't take care of it is a fool. You don't hate him, but you got to pity him."

"I am your number one fan."

"For a moment the dark and fearsomely sad thoughts which inhabit her mind grow even sadder and darker, Lisey thinks they will either kill her or drive her insane."

"Fiction is the truth inside the lie."

"FEAR stands for fuck everything and run."

"For years I dreamed of having the sort of massive oak slab that would dominate a room..."

"May your first day in hell last ten thousand years, and may it be the shortest."

"When you write a story you're telling yourself the story. When you rewrite your main job is taking out all the things that are NOT the story."

"A man's life was five dogs long, Cortland believed. The first was the one that taught you. The second was the one you taught. The third and fourth were the ones you worked. The last was the one that outlived you. That was the winter dog. Cortland's winter dog had no name. He thought of it only as the scarecrow dog."

"Some memories were all right, but others were dangerous."

"Love, the simplest, strongest, and most unforgiving of all emotions."

"Black as night and as beautiful as forever."

"When you're still too young to shave, optimism is a perfectly legitimate response to failure."

"The Dark Powers have to give before they can take."

"I am, when you stop to think of it, a member of a fairly select group: the final handful of American novelists who learned to read and write before they learned to eat a daily helping of video bullshit."

"Time and tide wait for no man."

"Good books don't give up all their secrets at once."

"Do you think... do you think people ever learn anything?"

"If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot."