"I am the literary equivalent of a Big Mac and Fries."

"Sometimes things work just because you think they work. It's as good a definition of faith as any."

"So what, ghosts can't hurt you. That's what I thought then."

"How does it happen that a writer who's not even very good - and I can say that, I've read four or five of his books - gets to be in charge of the world's destiny? Or of the entire universe's?"If he's not very good, why didn't you stop at one?"Mrs. Tassenbaum smiled. "TouchA©. He is readable, I'll give him that - tells a good story..."

"Some part of me knew from the first that what I wanted was not reality but myth."

"As Wendy watched them they burst into a chord of tinkling, girlish laughter. She felt a smile touch her own lips; not one of them could be under sixty."

"When it comes to sex, no pairing is beyond belief."

"Never will you talk to me like that again."

"It's hard enough for a person to keep their own socks pulled up, let alone someone else's."

"Henry did not want to be fixed, was somehow convinced that the fix would be a lie, something that would lessen him."

"At the end of her life she was aware of heat but not pain. She had time to consider his eyes, eyes of that blue which is the color of the sky at first light of the morning. She had time to think of him on the Drop, riding Rusher flat out with his black hair flying back from his temples and his neckerchief rippling; to see him laughing with an ease and freedom he would never find again in the long life which stretched out for him beyond hers, and it was his laughter she took with her as she went out, fleeing the light and heat in to the silkly, consoling dark, calling to him over and over as she went, calling bird and bear and hare and fish."

"I am what you might call a rambling man, and America is my beat."

"There's no bitch on earth like a mother frightened for her kids."

"Even when the lightening flashes inside them we say they are only clouds and turn our attention to the next meal, the next pain, the next breath, the next page. This is how we go on."

"But in the wake of 'Bullet,' all the guys wanted to know was, 'How's it doing? How's it selling?' How to tell them I didn't give a flying fuck how it was doing in the marketplace, that what I cared about was how it was doing in the reader's heart?"

"God makes it all come right in the end, that's what Johnnie told Dock Barker just before we parted company. I was raised a Christian-I admit I fell away a bit along my journey-and I believe that: we're stuck with what we have, but that's all right; in God's eyes, none of us are really much more than flies on strings and all that matters is how much sunshine you can spread along the way."

"The idea that creative endeavor and mind-altering substances are entwined is one of the great pop-intellectual myths of our time."

"They were close to the end of the beginning . . ."

"It was never for you, Annie, or all the other people out there who sign their letters "Your number-one fan. The minute you start to write all those people are at the other end of the galaxy, or something. It was never for my ex-wives, or my mother, or for my father. The reason authors almost always put a dedication on a book, Annie, is because their selfishness even horrifies themselves in the end."

"One of the really bad things you can do to your writing is to dress up the vocabulary, looking for long words because you're maybe a little bit ashamed of your short ones. This is like dressing up a household pet in evening clothes. The pet is embarrassed and the person who committed this act of premeditated cuteness should be even more embarrassed."

"When rationality begins to break down, the circuits of the human brain can overload. Axons grow bright and feverish. Hallucinations turn real: the quicksilver puddle at the point where perspective makes parallel lines seem to intersect is really there; the dead walk and talk; a rose begins to sing."

"Her support was a constant, one of the few good things I could take as a given. And whenever I see a first novel dedicated to a wife (or a husband), I smile and think, There's someone who knows. Writing is a lonely job. Having someone who believes in you makes a lot of difference. They don't have to make speeches. Just believing is usually enough."

"Men! She could not understand why so many women feared them. Hadn't the gods made them with the most vulnerable part of their guts hanging right out of their bodies, like a misplaced bit of bowel? Kick them there and they curled up like snails. Caress them there and their brains melted."

"People don't get better, they just get smarter. When you get smarter you don't stop pulling the wings off flies, you just think of better reasons for doing it."

"Once, during the drinking phase, Wendy had accused him of desiring his own destruction but not possessing the necessary moral fiber to support a full-blown deathwish. So he manufactured ways in which other people could do it, lopping a piece at a time off himself and their family."

"Moonlight flooded in the windows and silvered the room, turning it into a lagoon of dreams."

"The Man in Black fled across the desert, and the Gunslinger followed."

"Time heals all wounds."

"You have the right to remain silent,' the big cop said in his robot's voice. 'If you do not choose to remain silent, anything you say may be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to an attorney. I'm going to kill you. If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be provided for you. Do you understand your rights as I have explained them to you?"

"Looking up at that starry sky gave him the creeps: it was too big, too black. It was all too possible to imagine it turning blood-red, all too possible to imagine a Face forming in lines of fire."

"One of the few things my father says when he's had a few that I agree with is that kids don't have much balls in this generation. Some of them are trying to start the revolution by bombing U.S. government washrooms, but none of them are throwing Molotov cocktails at the Pentagon."

"Most gothics are overplotted novels whose success or failure hinges on the author's ability to make you believe in the characters and partake of the mood."

"Life is fair. We all get the same nine-month shake in the box, and then the dice roll. Some people get a run of sevens. Some people, unfortunately, get snake-eyes. Its just how the world is."

"Oh shit, the mummy's after us, let's all walk a little faster."

"And because Eddie knew that was only the truth, he said nothing."

"Once again there was the desert, and that only."

"The idea that the creative endeavor and mind-altering substances are entwined is one of the great pop-intellectual myths of our time. ... Substance abusing writers are just substance abusers - common garden variety drunks and druggies, in other words. Any claims that the drugs and alcohol are necessary to dull a finer sensibility are just the usual self-serving bullshit. I've heard alcoholic snowplow drivers make the same claim, that they drink to still the demons."

"The hardest for man is lie to himself between 3:00 and 6:00 in the morning."

"Teaching school is like having jumper cables hooked to your brain, draining all the juice out of you."

"Take the dead from the dead, the old proverb said; only a corpse may speak true prophecy."

"Obliqueness is the curse of the reading class."

"Oddly, the burned hand didn't seem to hurt much anymore; it was only numb. It would have been better if there had been pain. Pain was at least real."

"I believe the first draft of a book - even a long one - should take no more than three months. Any longer and - for me, at least - the story begins to take on an odd foreign feel, like a dispatch from the Romanian Department of Public Affairs, or something broadcast on high-band shortwave duiring a period of severe sunspot activity."

"As with all other aspects of the narrative art, you will improve with practice, but practice will never make you perfect. Why should it? What fun would that be?"

"She was satisfied with the answer God had given Moses from the burning bush when Moses had seen fit to question. Who are you? Mose asks, and God comes back from that bush just as pert as you like: I Am, Who I AM. In other words, Mose, stop beatin around this here bush and get your old ass in gear."

"The inmates made jokes about the chair, the way people always make jokes about things that frighten them but can't be gotten away from."

"Misery suffered did not justify misery to come."

"The old sleep poorly. Perhaps they stand watch."

"She looks like the type that might freak out. It's something in the eyes, Frannie. It says if you shoot my sacred cows, I'll shoot yours."

"For me writing has always been best when it's intimate, as sexy as skin on skin."