"Words have weight."

"You want to remember that while you're judging the book, the book is also judging you."

"The road to hell is paved with adverbs."

"The scholar's greatest weakness: calling procrastination research."

"Discipline and constant work are the whetstones upon which the dull knife of talent is honed until it becomes sharp enough, hopefully, to cut through even the toughest meat and gristle."

"You can approach the act of writing with nervousness, excitement, hopefulness, or despair ... Come to it any way but lightly."

"The muses are ghosts, and sometimes they come uninvited."

"The object of fiction isn't grammatical correctness but to make the reader welcome and then tell a story.... Writing is seduction. Good talk is part of seduction."

"You discarded most of the lies along the way but held on to the one that said life mattered."

"At the end of almost every AA meeting, someone read the Promises. One of these was 'We will not regret the past nor wish to shut the door on it'. Dan thought he would always regret the past, but he had quit trying to shut the door. Why bother, when it would just come open again? The fucking had no latch, let alone a lock."

"There's no harm in hoping for the best as long as you're prepared for the worst."

"For men, I think, love is a thing formed of equal parts lust and astonishment. The astonishment part women understand. The lust part they only think they understand."

"The monster nevers dies."

"Writing is a lonely job. Having someone who believes in you makes a lot if difference. They don't have to makes speeches. Just believing is usually enough."

"A lot of us grow up and we grow out of the literal interpretation that we get when we're children, but we bear the scars all our life. Whether they're scars of beauty or scars of ugliness, it's pretty much in the eye of the beholder."

"If a man dethrones God in his heart, Satan must ascend to His position."

"There was a beautiful feeling of calm in my groin, a sense of peace so remarkable it was almost ecstasy--anyone who' suffered bad pain and then recovered will know what I'm talking about."

"He was in that mostly empty-headed state of grace which is sometimes such fertile soil ; it's the ground from which our brightest dreams and biggest ideas (both good and spectacularly bad) suddenly burst forth, often full-blown."

"I started after him...and the clown looked back. I saw Its eyes, and all at once I understood who It was."Who was it, Don?" Harold Gardner asked softly."It was Derry," Don Hagarty said. "It was this town."

"Relief loosens tongues beyond measure."

"I am, he thought dimly, watching a vampire take a piss."

"It's worked! Our marriage has outlasted all of the world leaders, except for Castro. And if we keep talking, arguing, making love and dancing to the Ramones- it'll probably keep working."

"Love didn't grow very well in a place where there was only fear."

"He lay back, put his arm over his eyes, and tried to hold onto the anger, because the anger made him feel brave. A brave man could think. A coward couldn't."

"No, honey. Maybe you can put the things from the Overlook away in lockboxes, but not memories. Never those. They're the real ghosts."

"Mrs. Cole was a perfect democrat. She hated all kids equally."

"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. If you intend to write as truthfully as you can, your days as a member of polite society are numbered, anyway."

"Here is one of the great truths of the human condition: when you need Stayfree Maxi Pads to absorb the expectorants produced by your insulted body, you are in serious fucking trouble."

"Maybe this isn't home, nor ever was- maybe home is where I have to go tonight. Home is the place where when you go there, you have to finally face the thing in the dark."

"You haven't finished the key, but not because you are afraid to finish. You're afraid of finding you can't finish. You're afraid to go down to where the stones stand, but not because you're afraid of what may come once you enter the circle. You're afraid of what may not come. You're not afraid of the great world, Eddie, but of the small one inside yourself."

"A change is as good as a rest."

"It's hard for me to believe that people who read very little (or not at all in some cases) should presume to write and expect people to like what they have written."

"Get busy living or get busy dying."

"This is how we bring about our own damnation, you know-by ignoring the voice that begs us to stop. To stop while there's still time."

"When you spend your life taking care of mudmen, you can't help getting a little dirty yourself."

"He didn't know if that was really true or not, but he discovered something which was tremendously liberating: he didn't care. He was very tired of thinking and thinking and still not knowing. He was also tired of being frightened, like a man who has entered a cave on a lark and now begins to suspect he is lost. Stop thinking about it, then. That's the solution."

"When one has little faith, one must survive from day to day signs."

"You can lead a whore to culture, but you can't make her think."

"The eyes were damned, the staring, glaring eyes of one who sees but does not see, eyes ever turned inward to the sterile hell of dreams beyond control, dreams unleashed, risen out of the stinking swamps of the unconscious."

"It seems to occur to few of the attendees [of a writing retreat] that if you have a feel you just can't describe, you might just be, I don't know, kind of like, my sense of it is, maybe in the wrong fucking class."

"If it's ka it'll come like a wind, and your plans will stand before it no more than a barn before a cyclone."

"Humor is almost always anger with its make-up on."

"Maybe, he thought, there aren't any such things as good friends or bad friends-maybe there are just friends, people who stand by you when you're hurt and who help you feel not so lonely. Maybe they're always worth being scared for, and hoping for, and living for. Maybe worth dying for, too, if that's what has to be."

"But when fall comes, kicking summer out on its treacherous ass as it always does one day sometime after the midpoint of September, it stays awhile like an old friend that you have missed. It settles in the way an old friend will settle into your favorite chair and take out his pipe and light it and then fill the afternoon with stories of places he has been and things he has done since last he saw you."

"Who gets to be best-liked in any community? Who is the most trusted? Why, the man who does the dirty job, of course, and does it with a smile. The man who does the job you couldn't bring yourself to do."

"Those are the only to verbalizations usually that we make in movies-either to scream or to laugh-because those two reactions are rather close. Most things we laugh at are things that are really horrible, when you think about them. It's funny and you don't scream, as long as it's not you. If it's somebody else you can laugh."

"They walked through the rainy dark like gaunt ghosts, and Garraty didn't like to look at them. They were the walking dead."

"Luck's the word those with poor hearts use for ka..."

"There is a muse, but he's not going to come fluttering down into your writing room and scatter creative fairy-dust all over your typewriter or computer station. He lives in the ground. He's a basement guy. You have to descend to his level, and once you get down there you have to furnish an apartment for him to live in. You have to do all the grunt labor, in other words, while the muse sits and smokes cigars and admires his bowling trophies and pretends to ignore you."

"The things of the world fell by the wayside . . . but literature was eternal."