"I'm going crazy, Louis thought wonderingly. Wheeeeee!"

"A kid of your age-any kid-could get hold of matches if she wanted to, burn up the house or whatever. But not many do. Why would they want to?"

"In the year 2025, the best men don't run for president, they run for their lives. . . ."

"The fundamental difference between the sexes is this: men make assumptions, but women rarely do."

"All is forgotten in the stone halls of the dead. These are the rooms of ruin where the spiders spin and the great circuits fall quiet, one by one..."

"That one smooth black eye stared, and reflected in it I fancied I could see the cyclopeon city, and the endless column of the marching dead."

"Garraty wondered how it would be, to lie in the biggest, dustiest library silence of all, dreaming endless, thoughtless dreams behind your gummed-down eyelids, dressed forever in your Sunday suit. No worries about money, success, fear, joy, pain, sorrow, sex, or love. Absolute zero. No father, mother, girlfriend, lover. The dead are orphans. No company but the silence like a moth's wing. An end to the agony of movement, to the long nightmare of going down the road. The body in peace, stillness, and order. The perfect darkness of death.How would that be? Just how would that be?"

"When you sit down to write, write. Don't do anything else except go to the bathroom, and only do that if it absolutely cannot be put off."

"Then, instead of telling her that where there was life there was hope, or to let a smile be her umbrella, or that it was always darkest just before the dawn, or anything else that had just lately fallen out of the dog's ass, she simply held her. Because sometimes only holding was best. That was one of the things she had taught that man whose last name she had taken for her own--that sometimes it was best to be quiet; sometimes it was best to just shut your everlasting mouth and hang on, hang on, hang on."

"Some of this book-perhaps too much-has been about how I learned to do it. Much of it has been about how you can do it better. The rest of it-and perhaps the best of it-is a permission slip: you can, you should, and if you're brave enough to start, you will. Writing is magic, as much the water of life as any other creative art. The water is free. So drink. Drink and be filled up."

"If there are ten thousand medieval peasants who create vampires by believing them real, there may be one"probably a child"who will imagine the stake necessary to kill it. But a stake is only stupid wood; the mind is the mallet which drives it home."

"That wasn't any act of God. That was an act of pure human fuckery."

"He knew a great deal of the Bible already, and he knew the Bible believed in all sorts of weird stuff. According to the Bible, God Himself was at least one-third Ghost, and that was just the beginning. You could tell the Bible believed in demons, because Jesus threw a bunch of them out of this guy. Real chuckalicious ones, too. When Jesus asked the guy who had them what his name was, the demons answered and told Him to go join the Foreign Legion. Or something like that."

"The mind can calculate, but the spirit yearns, and the heart knows what the heart knows."

"If you wrote something for which someone sent you a cheque, if you cashed the cheque and it didn't bounce, and if you then paid the light bill with the money, I consider you talented."

"In a marriage, words are like rain. And the land of a marriage is filled with dry washes and arroyos that can become raging rivers in almost the wink of an eye. The therapists believe in talk, but most of them are either divorced or queer. It's silence that is a marriage's best friend."

"You couldn't not like someone who liked the guitar."

"Like all sweet dreams, it will be brief, but brevity makes sweetness, doesn't it?"

"His head .. it exploded. As if someone had scooped out his brains and put a hand grenade in his skull."

"Being sorry for myself is a luxury I can't afford."

"Oh Christ, he understood more than he wanted to right now. Give me a chance, Louis thought, and I'llunderstand myself right into the nearest mental asylum."

"She might have been pretty when she started out, but the world had moved on since then."

"Any thoughts of guilt, any feelings of regret, had faded. The desert had baked them out."

"Like anything else that happens on its own, the act of writing is beyond currency. Money is great stuff to have, but when it comes to the act of creation, the best thing is not to think of money too much. It constipates the whole process."

"I see things, that's all. Write enough stories and every shadow on the floor looks like a footprint; every line in the dirt like a secret message."

"They found him guilty, and brother, if Maine had the death penalty, he would have done the airdance before that spring's crocuses poked their heads out of the dirt."

"Never tell to much. The monster is always scarier when it is still under the child's bed."

"Free at last, he thought. Great God Almighty, I'm free at last. Then: I believe this is redemption. And it's good, isn't it? Quite good, indeed."

"Your hair is winter fire,January embers.My heart burns there, too.-Stephen King, IT."

"Symbolism exists to adorn and enrich, not to create an artificial sense of profundity."

"Disappointment was never a thing you looked for, but it had a wonderful way of clearing the mind."

"She was crazy but he needed her. Oh I am in so much trouble he thought, and stared blindly up at the ceiling as the droplets of sweat began to gather on his forehead again."

"Almost everyone can remember losing his or her virginity, and most writers can remember the first book he/she put down thinking: I can do better than this. Hell, I am doing better than this! What could be more encouraging to the struggling writer than to realize his/her work is unquestionably better than that of someone who actually got paid for his/her stuff?"

"She can't help it,' he said. 'She's got the soul of a poet and the emotional makeup of a junkyard dog."

"But now the joy is gone and the sadness is back, the sadness feels like something deserved, the price of some not-quite-forgotten betrayal."

"I don't want to see it anymore. It's lousy. And it's a cheat. You build it all around something... set yourself on something... and then you don't want it. Isn't it too bad the great truths are all such lies?"

"Do grown men always have to play games? Does everything have to be an excuse for another kind of game? Do any men grow up or do they only come of age?"

"He kept seeing the brains dribbling down the wallpaper. It wasn't the killing that stayed on his mind, it was the spilled talent. A lifetime of honing and shaping torn apart in less than a second. All those stories, all those images, and what came out looked like so much oatmeal. What was the point?"

"Come on, Doctor... we got places to go."

"What I know now is that gallant young men rarely get pussy. Put it on a sampler and hang it in your kitchen."

"Was there even such a thing as normall? People had terrible things behing their faces sometimes. He knew that now."

"Lover," she whispers, and closes her eyes.It falls upon her.Love is like dying."

"Tony, Tony,come around, something's lost that can't be found."

"Women's lib, Frannie had decided, was nothing more nor less than an outgrowth of the technological society. Women were at the mercy of their bodies. They were smaller. They tended to be weaker. A man couldn't get with child, but a woman could---every four-year-old knows it. And a pregnant woman is a vulnerable human being. Civilization had provided an umbrella of sanity that both sexes could stand beneath."

"But sooner or later the last good time would come around. It does for all of us."

"He will be with his friends, and that always feels like coming home."

"Go with your bad self."

"You try to tell yourself that you've been lucky, most incredibly lucky, and usually that works because it's true. Sometimes it doesn't work, that's all. Then you cry."

"Life is more than just steering a course around pain."

"If you're going into a very dark place, then you should take a bright light, and shine it on everything. If you don't want to see, why in God's name would you dare the dark at all?"