"What if there were no grownups? Suppose the whole idea of grownups was an illusion? What if their money was really just play-ground marbles, their business deals no more than baseball-card trades, their wars only games of guns in the park? What if they were all still snotty-nosed kids inside their suits and dresses? Christ, that couldn't be, could it? It was too horrible to think about."

"But grownups were always in a turmoil, every possible action muddied over by thoughts of the consequences, by self-doubt, by selfimage, by feelings of love and responsibility. Every possible choice seemed to have drawbacks, and sometimes he didn't understand why the drawbacks were drawbacks. It was very hard."

"Nobody likes to see a stupid guy wise up."

"You play the game to the end. That's how it works, play to the end."

"Horace, like all dogs, heard dead-voices quite often, and sometimes saw their owners."

"Not that length and weight alone indicate excellence, many epic tales are pretty much epic crap."

"It always comes down to just two choices. Get busy living, or get busy dying."

"The trust of the innocent is the liar's most useful tool."

"Remember that "seeing is believing" puts the cart before the horse. Art is the concrete artifact of faith and expectation, the realization of a world that would otherwise be little more than a veil of pointless consciousness stretched over a gulf of mystery."

"Norris didn't cry, but he was apt to puke on them, the way he had puked on homer gamache that time he had found homer sprawled in a ditch out by homeland cemetary, beaten to death with his own artificial arm."

"Jake went in, aware that he had, for the first time in three weeks, opened a door without hoping madly to find another world on the other side. A bell jingled overhead. The mild, spicy smell of old books hit him, and the smell was somehow like coming home."

"That rational voice was right to be frightened. There's something in us that is very much attracted to madness. Everyone who looks off the edge of a tall building has felt a faint, morbid urge to jump."

"The terror, which would not end for another twenty-eight years"if it ever did end"began, so far as I know or can tell, with a boat made from a sheet of newspaper floating down a gutter swollen with rain."

"Why is it that so many people think all the answers are in their wallet?"

"Time takes it all, whether you want it or not. Time takes it all, time bears it away, and in the end there is only darkness. Sometimes we find others in that darkness, and sometimes we lose them there again."

"Death in the horror movies is when the monsters get you."

"What you need to remember is that there's a difference between lecturing about what you know and using it to enrich the story. The latter is good. The former is not."

"If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot, reading is the creative center of a writer's life, you cannot hope to sweep someone else away by the force of your writing until it has been done to you."

"Like some dogs: kick them once and they never trust you again, no matter how nice you are to them."

"He didn't like the way things were going.There were bad omens in the wind, evil portents like bats fluttering in the dark loft of a deserted barn."

"In here I'm the guy who can get things for you... outside all you need is the Yellow Pages. I don't think I could make it."

"Alone.Yes,that's the key word, the most awful word in the English tongue. Murder doesn't hold a candle to it and hell is only a poor synonym."

"I don't care so much about what you can stand or what you can manage as I do about what you like and want to have. Those are the kinds of things I want to give you, because I'm crazy about you."

"When you're twenty-one, life is a roadmap. It's only when you get to twenty-five or so that you begin to suspect you've been looking at the map upside down, and not until you're forty are you entirely sure. By the time you're sixty, take it from me, you're fucking lost."

"Never give a good politician time to pray."

"Writing isn't about making money, getting famous, getting dates, getting laid, or making friends. In the end, it's about enriching the lives of those who will read your work, and enriching your own life, as well. It's about getting up, getting well, and getting over. Getting happy, okay? Getting happy."

"He put the car in gear and went, feeling again how easy it had been to slip through an unexpected fissure in what he had considered a solid life- how easy it was to get over onto the dark side, to sail out of the blue and into the black."

"It didn t occur to me until later that there s another truth, very simple: greed in a good cause is still greed."

"The truth is that most writers are needy."

"Wherever you write is supposed to be a little bit of a refuge, a place where you can get away from the world. The more closed in you are, the more you're forced back on your own imagination."

"She looked out and saw a tall and comely woman beckoning to her. Susannah's first look at Mia in the flesh astounded her, because the chap's mother was *white.* Apparently Odetta-that-was now had a Caucasian side to her personality and how that must frost Detta Walker's racially sensitive butt!"

"I think you will find that, if you continue to write fiction, every character you create is partly you."

"Try any goddam thing you like, no matter how boringly normal or outrageous. If it works, fine. If it doesn't, toss it. Toss it even if you love it."

"We could argue about what constitutes the creepiest line in pop music, but for me it's early Beatles- John Lennon, actually- singing 'I'd rather see you dead, little girl, than to be with another man."

"He could not say goodbye to these three rooms as he could to a house he had loved: hotel rooms accepted departures emotionlessly."

"Pack up all my care and woe, blackbird, bye-bye."

"Ka was a wheel, it was also a net from which none ever escaped."

"The choice, as Eddie saw it, was as simple as it was brutal: get moving and keep moving or stand in one place long enough to start thinking about what all of this meant and simply die of fright."

"All right I think we've been down here in the dark long enough. There's a whole other world upstairs. Take my hand, Constant Reader, and I'll be happy to lead you back into the sunshine. I'm happy to go there because I believe most people are essentially good. I know that I am. It's you I'm not entirely sure of."

"I love you too much to lie to you, Lisey. I love you with all that passes for my heart. I suspect that kind of all-out love becomes a burden to a woman in time, but it's the only kind I have to give. I think we're going to be quite a wealthy couple in terms of money, but I'll almost certainly be an emotional pauper all my life. I've got the money coming, but as for the rest I've got just enough for you, and I won't ever dirty or dilute it with lies. Not with the words I say, not with the ones I hold back."

"The multiple choices and possibilities of daily life are the music we dance to. They are like strings on a guitar. Strum them and you make a pleasing sound. A harmonic."

"The shuddering would not stop. The pain was like the end of the world. He thought: There comes a point when the very discussion of pain becomes redundant. No one knows there is pain the size of this in the world. No one. It is like being possessed by demons."

"Faith is, by its very definition, belief without proof."

"Call me Richard. That's my real name. Call me that."

"Pain is the biggest power of love." That's what Wireman says."

"Being needed is a great thing. Maybe the great thing."

"Bill suited the action to the word, getting up and leaning over the handlebars and pumping the pedals at a lunatic rate. Looking at Bill's back, which was amazingly broad for a boy of eleven-going-on-twelve, watching it work under the duffel coat, the shoulders slanting first one way and then the other as he shifted his weight from one pedal to the other, Richie suddenly became sure that they were invulnerable...they would live forever and ever."

"What you don't know, you can't tell. Or made to tell."

"I watched Titanic when I got back home from the hospital, and cried. I knew that my IQ had been damaged."

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