love is what moves the world, I’ve always thought…it is the only thing which allows men and women to stand in a world where gravity always seems to want to pull them down…bring them low…and make them crawl…
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.
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
Monsters are real, and ghosts are real too. They live inside us, and sometimes, they win.
No one ever does live happily ever after, but we leave the children to find that out for themselves.
We never know which lives we influence, or when, or why.
What we like to think of ourselves and what we really are rarely have much in common….
I wouldn’t have missed a single minute of it, Not for the whole world.
We fool ourselves so much we could do it for a living.
You are the grim, goal-oriented ones who will not believe that the joy is in the journey rather than the destination no matter how many times it has been proven to you.
In the year 2025, the best men don’t run for president, they run for their lives. . . .
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.
I wanted to say goodbye to someone, and have someone say goodbye to me. The goodbyes we speak and the goodbyes we hear are the goodbyes that tell us we´re still alive.
They’re animals, all right. But why are you so goddam sure that makes us human beings?
Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration, the rest of us just get up and go to work.
The place where you made your stand never mattered. Only that you were there…and still on your feet.
Fault always lies in the same place: with him weak enough to lay blame.
Am I weird?””Yeah. But so what? Everybody’s weird.
And people who don’t dream, who don’t have any kind of imaginative life, they must… they must go nuts. I can’t imagine that.
If you don’t have the time to do something right, where are you going to find the time to fix it?
The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want for nothing. He makes me lie down in the green pastures. He greases up my head with oil. He gives me kung-fu in the face of my enemies. Amen
Until we see each other again, keep your head together, read some good books, be useful, be happy.
When his life was ruined, his family killed, his farm destroyed, Job knelt down on the ground and yelled up to the heavens, “Why god? Why me?” and the thundering voice of God answered, There’s just something about you that pisses me off.
That wasn’t any act of God. That was an act of pure human fuckery.
I think part of being a parent is trying to kill your kids.
A boy who once wiped his ass with poison ivy probably doesn’t belong in a smart people’s club.
Oh shit, the mummy’s after us, let’s all walk a little faster
Murder is like potato chips: you can’t stop with just one.
Why’ is a crooked letter and can’t be made straight.
The greatest mystery the universe offers is not life but Size.
But this wealth of information produced little or no insight.
I felt lonely and content at the same time. I believe that is a rare kind of happiness.
A person can go along quite awhile if they get a good day every once and again.
You always know the truth, because when you cut yourself or someone else with it, there’s always a bloody show.
Why does she have to be such a…such a…””Go on,” I said. “The truth is never cussing, Son.””Such a bitch!
Things conceived by minds and made by hands can never be quite the same, even if they try their best to be identical, because they’re never the same from day to day or even moment to moment.
The world was full of monsters, and they were all allowed to bite the innocent and the unwary
Some part of me knew from the first that what I wanted was not reality but myth.
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.
never’s the word God listens for when he needs a laugh.
There’s always a choice. That’s God’s way, always will be. Your will is still free. Do as you will. There’s no set of leg-irons on you. But… this is what God wants of you.
It don’t matter if you believe in God Nick, he believes in you.
If God rewards us on earth for good deeds—the Old Testament suggests it’s so, and the Puritans certainly believed it—then maybe Satan rewards us for evil ones.
And because Eddie knew that was only the truth, he said nothing.
Sometimes when you’re young, you have moments of such happiness, you think you’re living on someplace magical, like Atlantis must have been. Then we grow up and our hearts break into two.
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.
Remember, Hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies.
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.
You’re dead, George. You just don’t have the sense to lie down.
The family exists for many reasons, but its most basic function may be to draw together after a member dies.
We fall from womb to tomb, from one blackness and toward another, remembering little of the one and knowing nothing of the other … except through faith.
There was a lot they didn’t tell you about death, she had discovered, and one of the biggies was how long it took the ones you loved most to die in your heart.
We have once again succeeded in destroying what we could not create.
We each owe a death, there are no exceptions, I know that, but sometimes, oh God, the Green Mile is so long.
Death in the horror movies is when the monsters get you.
Kill you all!” The clown was laughing and screaming. “Try to stop me and I’ll kill you all! Drive you crazy and then kill you all! You can’t stop me!
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.
To his way of thinking, the only thing more natural than death was sex.
He could not say goodbye to these three rooms as he could to a house he had loved: hotel rooms accepted departures emotionlessly.
A life without books is a thirsty life, and one without poetry is…like a life without pictures.
If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.
The scariest moment is always just before you start.
If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.
you can, you should, and if you’re brave enough to start, you will.
A short story is a different thing altogether – a short story is like a quick kiss in the dark from a stranger.
A little talent is a good thing to have if you want to be a writer. But the only real requirement is the ability to remember every scar.
Description begins in the writer’s imagination, but should finish in the reader’s.
Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule.
Write with the door closed, rewrite with the door open.
In many cases when a reader puts a story aside because it ‘got boring,’ the boredom arose because the writer grew enchanted with his powers of description and lost sight of his priority, which is to keep the ball rolling.
Kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your darlings.
You cannot hope to sweep someone else away by the force of your writing until it has been done to you.
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.
The trick is to teach yourself to read in small sips as well as long swallows.
When you write a book, you spend day after day scanning and identifying the trees. When you’re done, you have to step back and look at the forest.
If you wrote something for which someone sent you a check, if you cashed the check and it didn’t bounce, and if you then paid the light bill with the money, I consider you talented.
If you’re just starting out as a writer, you could do worse than strip your television’s electric plug-wire, wrap a spike around it, and then stick it back into the wall. See what blows, and how far. Just an idea.
The more you read, the less apt you are to make a fool of yourself with your pen or word processor.
I like to get ten pages a day, which amounts to 2,000 words. That’s 180,000 words over a three-month span, a goodish length for a book — something in which the reader can get happily lost, if the tale is done well and stays fresh.
Outlines are the last resource of bad fiction writers who wish to God they were writing masters’ theses.
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.
You can approach the act of writing with nervousness, excitement, hopefulness, or despair … Come to it any way but lightly.
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.
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?
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.
No, it’s not a very good story – its author was too busy listening to other voices to listen as closely as he should have to the one coming from inside.
There are lots of guys out there who write a better prose line than I do and who have a better understanding of what people are really like and what humanity is supposed to mean – hell, I know that.
Sometimes stories cry out to be told in such loud voices that you write them just to shut them up.
The writer must have a good imagination to begin with, but the imagination has to be muscular, which means it must be exercised in a disciplined way, day in and day out, by writing, failing, succeeding and revising.”, May/June 2009)]
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.
He felt as he always did when he finished a book — queerly empty, let down, aware that for each little success he had paid a toll of absurdity.
I’ve met talespinners before, Jake, and they’re all cut more or less from the same cloth. They tell tales because they’re afraid of life.
Sometimes you have to go on when you don’t feel like it, and sometimes you’re doing good work when if feels like all you’re managing is to shovel shit from a sitting position.
Reading takes time, and the glass teat takes too much of it.
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.
It’s about getting up, getting well, and getting over. Getting happy, okay? Getting happy.
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.
Fantasy fiction is essentially about the concept of power great fantasy fiction is about people who find it at great cost or lose it tragically mediocre fantasy fiction is about people who have it and never lose it but simply wield it.
Story is honorable and trustworthy; plot is shifty, and best kept under house arrest.
The idea that creative endeavor and mind-altering substances are entwined is one of the great pop-intellectual myths of our time.
Symbolism exists to adorn and enrich, not to create an artificial sense of profundity.
…writers are often the worst judges of what they have written.
There’s an old rule of theater that goes, ‘If there’s a gun on the mantel in Act I, it must go off in Act III.’ The reverse is also true.
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 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.
It’s best to have your tools with you. If you don’t, you’re apt to find something you didn’t expect and get discouraged.
I gradually realized that I was seeing another example of creative ebb, another step by another art on the road that may indeed end in extinction.
Talent is a wonderful thing, but it won’t carry a quitter.
Everybody trusts a guy in a raincoat. I don’t know why. It’s just one of those mystery facts.
It’s how we see the world that keeps the darkness beyond at bay. Keeps it from pouring through and devouring us. I think all of us might know that, way down deep.
Strong delusions travel like cold germs on a sneeze.
I can’t understand why people use religion to hurt each other when there’s already so much pain in the world.
Every man or woman who loves Him, they hate Him too, because He’s a hard God, a jealous God.
Oh no, praying is great, without it the thumbscrews and the Iron Maiden probably never would have been invented.
The woman who preaches has poison religion. Let the respectable ones go
Your first impulse is to share good news, your second is to club someone with it.
She couldn’t be on his wavelength all the time. That’s all. When you could recognize that and deal with it, you were on your way to an adult relationship.
Shall there be truth between us, as two men? Not as friends, but as enemies and equals?
Friends and lovers lie endlessly, caught in the web of regard
There came a time when you realized that moving on was pointless. That you took yourself with you wherever you went.
Some stuff has to be done even if there is a risk. That’s the first important thing I ever found out I didn’t find out from my mother
In the end, the wind takes everything, doesn’t it? And why not? Why other? If the sweetness of our lives did not depart, there would be no sweetness at all.
she might have been pretty when she started out, but the world had moved on since then.
He had never been a social man. He had shunned causes with contempt and disgust. They were for pig-simple suckers and people with too much time and money on their hands
I am, he thought dimly, watching a vampire take a piss.
What we’ve got here is a lunatic genius ghost-in-the-computer monorail that likes riddles and goes faster than the speed of sound. Welcome to the fantasy version of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
Four young men in motorcycle jackets… set upon the man in khaki shorts and beat him unconscious with his own sandwich board.
Books are the perfect entertainment: no commercials, no batteries, hours of enjoyment for each dollar spent. What I wonder is why everybody doesn’t carry a book around for those inevitable dead spots in life.
Good books don’t give up all their secrets at once.
Speaking personally, you can have my gun, but you’ll take my book when you pry my cold, dead fingers off of the binding.
You want to remember that while you’re judging the book, the book is also judging you.
Without story books is like a person with no soul.
A book is like a pump. It gives nothing unless first you give to it. You prime a pump with your own water, you work the handle with your own strength. You do this because you expect to get back more than you give.
Books are the perfect entertainment: no commercials, no batteries,hours of enjoyment for each dollar spent.
Henry did not want to be fixed, was somehow convinced that the fix would be a lie, something that would lessen him.
If someone had asked him, “Ben, are you lonely? , ” he would have looked at that someone with real surprise. The question had never even occurred to him. He had no friends, but he had his books and his dreams;
If someone had asked him, “Ben, are you lonely? , ” he would have looked at that someone with real surprise. The question had never even occurred to him. He had no friends, but he had his books and his dreams…
There’s nothing I like better than a good book discussion with someone who can hold up his end of the argument.
The things of the world fell by the wayside . . . but literature was eternal.
Eddie discovered one of his childhood’s great truths. Grownups are the real monsters, he thought.
If a fear cannot be articulated, it can’t be conquered.
Love didn’t grow very well in a place where there was only fear
FEAR stands for face everything and recover – Old AA saying
Maybe he sells fear because he’s got nothing else to sell.
Love didn’t grow very well in a place where there was only fear, just as plants didn’t grow very well in a place where it was always dark.
It was all right to feel fear, but sometimes a very bad idea to show it.
Your hair is winter fire,January embers.My heart burns there, too.-Stephen King, IT
Friends don’t spy; true friendship is about privacy, too.
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.
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.
Pride was the belt you used to hold your pants up when you had no pants.
Friendships founded on laughter are always fortuitous.
(…) if that’s what has to be. no good friends. No bad riends. Only people you want, need to be with; people who build their houses in your heart.
(…) if that’s waht has to be. No good friends. No bad friends. Only people you want, need to be with; people who build their houses in your heart.
The most important things are the hardest things to say, because words diminish them…
Do you think… do you think people ever learn anything?
Was there even such a thing as normall? People had terrible things behing their faces sometimes. He knew that now.
… it would matter … to the tens of thousands of young Americans … who would … be invited to put on uniforms, fly to the other side of the world, spread their nether cheeks, and sit down on the big green dildo that was Vietnam.
And the shooting will happen so fast and be over so quick that you’ll wonder what all the planning and palaver was for, when in the end it always comes down to the same five minutes’ worth of blood, pain, and stupidity.
Like all sweet dreams, it will be brief, but brevity makes sweetness, doesn’t it?
You grew up, became a man, had to adjust to taking less than you hoped for; you discovered the dream-machine had a big OUT OF ORDER sign on it.
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.
Dreams, after all, are insubstantial things, like mist itself.
I think that, even if we forget each other, we’ll remember in our dreams.
In nightmares we can think the worst. That’s what they’re for, I guess.
Dreams are a simple psychological emetic, and people who have them are more blessed than cursed
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.
Some birds are not meant to be caged, that’s all. Their feathers are too bright, their songs too sweet and wild.
He’s my cat! He’s not God’s cat! Let God have his own cat! Let God have all the damn old cats He wants, and kill them all! Church is mine!
Anyway, as the old barrelhouse song says, My God, how the money rolled in. Norton must have subscribed to the old Puritan notion that the best way to figure out which folks God favours is by checking their bank acounts.
And when there are enough outsiders together in one place, a mystic osmosis takes place and you’re inside.
Most politicians lie for the same reason a monkey swings by his tail, which is to say because he can.
A mob always picked its own leaders, and it always picked the right ones.
She can’t help it,’ he said. ‘She’s got the soul of a poet and the emotional makeup of a junkyard dog.
Your man Jesus seems to me a bit of a son of a bitch when it comes to women,´Roland said. ´Was He ever married?´The corners of Callahan’s mouth quirked. ´No´ he said, ´but His girlfriend was a whore.´´Well,´ Roland said, ´that’s a start.´
No one can tell what goes on in between the person you were and the person you become. No one can chart that blue and lonely section of hell. There are no maps of the change. You just come out the other side.Or you don’t.
I changed it. I had to. Do you know why?” She studied him, her eyes grave. “Because that was then and this is now. Because the past is gone, even though it defines the present.
the late afternoon sunlight, warm as oil, sweet as childhood …
It starts with this: put your desk in the corner, and every time you sit down there to write, remind yourself why it isn’t in the middle of the room. Life isn’t a support system for art. It’s the other way around.
The muses are ghosts, and sometimes they come uninvited.
How to Draw a Picture (XII)Know when you’re finished, and when you are, put your pencil or your paintbrush down. All the rest is only life.
Come to the book as you would come to an unexplored land. Come without a map. Explore it and draw your own map.
…Fritz Leiber, the great fantasist and science fiction writer…called books ‘the scholar’s mistress’…the one who made no demands and always took him in…
and now, all these years later, it seem to him that the most horrible fact of human existence was that broken hearts mended
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.
Pain rises. From the heart to the head pain rises.
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.
Bad news should always come after lunch.. first thing in the morning everything left a bruise.
Any good marriage is secret territory, a necessary white space on society’s map. What others don’t know about it is what makes it yours.
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.
You couldn’t not like someone who liked the guitar.
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.
A bad song for a night such as this, mayhap, but her heart went its own way without much interest in what her head thought or wanted; always had.
Lend me your wings, bird. I’ll spread them and fly on the thermals.
Sometimes human places, create inhuman monsters.― Stephen King, The Shining
One of his followers murmured agreement, but another quietly slipped away. Now there was Norton and four others. Maybe that wasn’t so bad. Christ Himself could only find twelve.
But it is. It’s something you need, and that’s a long way from nothing. If you need it, Eddie, we need it. What we don’t need is a man who can’t let go of the useless baggage of his memories.
By definition, though, we are family. And in difficult times– times like these– despite our differences, we stand together as family.
A successful marriage was a balancing act-that was a thing everyone knew. A successful marriage was also dependent on a high tolerance for irritation.
The mind can calculate, but the spirit yearns, and the heart knows what the heart knows
The concept of dreaming is known to the waking mind but to the dreamer there is no waking, no real world, no sanity; there is only the screaming bedlam of sleep.
It was really amazing the number of hard hits from which a mind could recover.
But there are weak men who can lift cars if their wives are pinned underneath. The brain, Garraty.” McVries’s voice had dropped to a hoarse whisper. “It isn’t man or God. It’s something…in the brain.
I will scream as the sanity leaves my mind forever. I will scream…but there is no one there to hear me.
and so will the world end, I think, a victim of love rather than hate. For love’s ever been the more destructive weapon, sure.
Pain is the biggest power of love.” That’s what Wireman says.
Paths cross all the time in this world of our, sometimes in the strangest places.
Sooner or later even the fastest runners have to stand and fight.
[L]ife is more than just steering a course around pain.
What you love, you must love all the harder because someday it will be gone.
Now that he wanted to feel like he was having a bad dream, he wasn’t. He was having a bad reality, and that was something from which you could not wake.
When an imaginative person gets into mental trouble, the line between seeming and being has a way of disappearing-
…there were those who might have suggested that reality is a highly untrustworthy concept, something perhaps no more solid than a piece of canvas stretched over an interlacing of cables like the strands of a spiderweb.
Cat can have kittens in the oven, girl, but that won’t ever make em muffins.
What I know now is that gallant young men rarely get pussy. Put it on a sampler and hang it in your kitchen.
When it comes to sex, no pairing is beyond belief.
Schizoid behavior is a pretty common thing in children. It’s accepted, because all we adults have this unspoken agreement that children are lunatics.
A few of the gunslingers dance, but only a few. And they were the young ones. The other ones only sat, and it seemed to me they were half embarrassed in all that light, that civilized light.
The heart also knows things, and so does the imagination. Thank God. If not for heart and imagination, the world of fiction would be a pretty seedy place. It might not even exist at all.
The Man in Black fled across the desert, and the Gunslinger followed
…and still the hands did their trick, like over-eager dogs that want to do their rolling—over trick for you not once or twice but all night.
It is completely raw, the sort of thing I feel free to do with the door shut—it’s the story undressed, standing up in nothing but its socks and undershorts.
We’ll just have to get along. That’s what people do, you know? They just get along. And try to help each other.
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.
A man who doubts himself shouldn’t have to try too hard for too long, not until he’s seasoned.
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.
Nothing is ever lost, Sarah. Nothing that can’t be found.
It always comes down to just two choices. Get busy living, or get busy dying.
I thought there would be time, but we always think stuff like that, don’t we? We fool ourselves so much we could do it for a living.
Get busy living or get busy dying.”― Stephen King, The Shawshank Redemption
Luck’s the word those with poor hearts use for ka…
He felt like a compass needle. The needle knows nothing about magnetic north; it only knows it must point in a certain direction, like it or not.
This was it, he knew it, was sure of it, this was the door which would take him back—
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.
When certain seeds are planted, they nearly always grow.
Sometimes things work just because you think they work. It’s as good a definition of faith as any.
Monsters are real and ghosts are real too they live inside us and sometimes they win.
He had been (Thinking? Praying?) It was all the same thing.
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.
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.
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?
To do otherwise with a ‘prentice was to ask for a second, less playful bite. And who would be to blame for that? Who but the teacher? For was he not training her to bite? Training both of them to bite?
The person healed has an obligation to then ask why— to meditate on God’s will, and the extraordinary lengths to which God has gone to realize His will.
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?
Like some dogs: kick them once and they never trust you again, no matter how nice you are to them.
Love, the simplest, strongest, and most unforgiving of all emotions.
At the same moment a cold chill traced a finger down the middle of my back. Sometimes things come back to you, that’s all. Sometimes they come back.
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.
You lost your innocence when you grew up, all right, everyone knew that, but did you have to lose your hope, as well?
Dead people put on weight, it seems to me; both in their flesh and in our minds, they put on weight.
Of course it’s heavier, he thought. It’s got my grief in it. I pull it along with me everywhere I go, so I do.
Grief is like a drunken house guest, always coming back for one more goodbye hug.
Same shit, different day, he thinks, but now the joy is gone and the sadness is back, the sadness that feels like something deserved, the price of some not-quite-forgotten betrayal.
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.
The writer must have a good imagination to begin with, but the imagination has to be muscular, which means it must be exercised in a disciplined way, day in and day out, by writing, failing, succeeding and revi
I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was 12 – Jesus, did you?
Friends come in and out of our lives, like busboys in a restaurant.
(…) if that’s what has to be. No good friends. No bad friends. Only people you want, need to be with; people who build their houses in your heart.
We was used to each other in the way I s’pose two old bats can get used to hangin upside-down next to each other in the same cave, even though they’re a long way from what you’d call the best of friends.
He will be with his friends, and that always feels like coming home.
No good friends, no bad friends; only people you want,need to be with. People who build their houses in your heart .
The fundamental difference between the sexes is this: men make assumptions, but women rarely do.
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?
At such times one sees everything and remembers it all. I know from personal experience. I wish I did not.
It was as if the body disdained memory… or refused the responsibility of it.
Seven, Richie thought. That’s the magic number. There has to be seven of us. That’s the way it’s supposed to be.
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.
Jake guessed Henry had been pulling shit like this on him so long that Eddie only noticed it when Henry pulled it on someone else – someone like the blonde ticket-seller.
They were with him, and for that little while the darkness was kind.
His head .. it exploded. As if someone had scooped out his brains and put a hand grenade in his skull.
Even the company of the mad was better than the company of the dead.
Lying in the bed that had once held two, Lisey thought alone never felt more lonely than when you woke up and discovered you still had the house to yourself. That you and the mice in the walls were the only ones still breathing.
He thought that fat boys were probably only allowed to love pretty girls inside. If he told anyone how he felt (not that he had anyone to tell), that person would probably laugh until he had a heart-attack.
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.
No one can tell what goes on in between the person you were and the person you become. No one can chart that blue and lonely section of hell. There are no maps of the change. You just… come out the other side.
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?
If God gives you something you can do, why in God’s name wouldn’t you do it?
The word is only a representation of the meaning, even at its best, writing almost always falls short of full meaning.
When it comes to the past, everyone writes fiction.
Because that was then and this is now. Because the past is gone, even though it defines the present.
I think houses live their own lives along a time-stream that’s different from the ones upon which their owners float, one that’s slower. In a house, especially an old one, the past is closer.
What our parents tell us when we are small seldom goes ignored, no matter how foolish it may be
Not everybody believes in ghosts, but I do. Do you know what they are, Trisha?She had shaken her head slowly.Men and women who can’t get over their past . . . That’s what ghosts are.
What he knows now is that guilt isn’t the only reason people commit suicide. Sometimes you can just get bored with afternoon TV.
When you’re still too young to shave, optimism is a perfectly legitimate response to failure.
By the time I was fourteen the nail in my wall would no longer support the weight of the rejection slips impaled upon it. I replaced the nail with a spike and went on writing.
Nothing lasts forever,’ Richie repeated. He looked up at Bill, and Bill saw tears cut slowly through the dirt on Richie’s cheeks.’Except maybe for love,’ Ben said.’And desire,’ Beverly said.
When you’retwenty-one, life is a roadmap.It’s only when you get to betwenty-five or so that youbegin to suspect you’ve beenlooking at the map upsidedown, and not until you’reforty are you entirely sure.
But sooner or later the last good time would come around. It does for all of us.
We’re not quite ending where we began, but close enough.Close enough.
Close your eyes and click your heals three times…because there’s no place like Dome.
… good advice was sometimes easier to give than receive.
You have come from the shadow of the heroin and the shadow of your brother, my friend. Come from the shadow of yourself, if you dare.
She ran out of her marriage the way a woman can run out of a pair of sandals when she decides to let go and really dash.
By the time he was done with the deer it had been dark three hours and his bad leg was singing ‘Ave Maria’.
You can never be too thin or too rich. And if you don’t believe it you were never really fat or really poor.
People who leave their drugs in a bathroom the guests use are just asking for trouble.
Time takes it all whether you want it to or not, time takes it all. Time bares it away, and in the end there is only darkness. Sometimes we find others in that darkness, and sometimes we lose them there again.
She could smell damprot, high, sweet, and cloying. She could smell madness like dead vegetables in a dark cellar.
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.
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.
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.
But in high school the business of irrevocable choices began. Doors slipped shut with a faint locking click that was only heared clearly in the dreams of later years.
Sometimes a cigar is just a smoke and a coincidence is just a coincidence.
Roland of Gilead responded as he ever had and ever would when such useless, mystifying questions were raised: ‘Ka.
If there’s to be damnation, she had said, let it be of my choosing, not theirs. He knew a little about damnation himself… and he had an idea that the lessons, far from being done, were just beginning.
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.
There were fourteen steps exactly fourteen. But the top one was smaller, out of proportion, as if it had been added to avoid the evil number.
They were still all beautiful and there was still enchantment and wonder, but she had crossed a line and now the fairy tale was green with corruption and evil.
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.
The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.
We make up horrors to help us cope with the real ones.
Give me just enough information so that I can lie convincingly.
Wendy? Darling? Light, of my life. I’m not gonna hurt ya. I’m just going to bash your brains in.
Invitation to Dance-It’s a Dance. And sometimes they turn the lights off in this ballroom.But we’ll dance anyway, you and I. Even in the Dark. Especially in the Dark.May I have the pleasure?
Swear to me swear to me that if it isn’t dead you’ll all come back.
He supposed that even in Hell, people got an occasional sip of water, if only so they could appreciate the full horror of unrequited thirst when it set in again.
Oh Christ, he groaned to himself, if this is the stuff adults have to think about I never want to grow up
Lover,” she whispers, and closes her eyes.It falls upon her.Love is like dying.
stop now before i kill youa word to the wise from your friendPENNYWISE
The things a man sees when he ain’t got a gun.–Watson the Caretaker
Until that afternoon in October four years ago, I hadn’t known dogs could scream.
It ain’t the blows we’re dealt that matter, but the ones we survive.
They walked through the rainy dark like gaunt ghosts, and Garraty didn’t like to look at them. They were the walking dead.
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.
Those aren’t doors, and they’re not opening. Those are crypts, Richie. They’re cracking open and the vampires you thought were dead are all flying out again.
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.
He felt more crypts cracking open inside of him; the stench he smelled was not decayed bodies but decayed memories, and that was somehow worse.
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.
Donald Trump is worse than any horror story I’ve written.
What none of them knew, of course, was that Carrie White was telekinetic.
There was an ocean above us, held in by a thin sac that might rupture and let down a flood at any second.
Never tell to much. The monster is always scarier when it is still under the child’s bed.
You stole my story and something’s got to be done about it.
I knew there were no ghosts in there, but on the other hand, what if there were?
We’ll eat your steam and lap up your blood. But first, we’ll drink your screams
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.
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.
There is no life here but the slow death of days, and so when the evil falls on the town, its coming seems almost preordained, sweet and morphic. It is almost as though the town knows the evil was coming and the shape it would take.
Moonlight flooded in the windows and silvered the room, turning it into a lagoon of dreams
When his life was ruined, his family killed, his farm destroyed, Job knelt down on the ground and yelled up to the heavens, “Why god? Why me?” and the thundering voice of God answered, “There’s just something about you that pisses me off.
There’s an idea that hell is other people. My idea is that it might be repetition.
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.
You’ve got to go to Boston, and you’ve got to go there NOW!!
My heart’s with you, Bill, no matter how it turns out. My heart is with all of them, and I think that, even if we forget each other, we’ll remember in our dreams.
What you don’t know, you can’t tell. Or made to tell.
You can lead a whore to culture, but you can’t make her think.
Working with him was sort of like trying to defuse a bomb with somebody standing behind you and every now and then clashing a pair of cymbals together. In a word, upsetting.
Good! he wanted to cry out to her. Good! Because you only had to see it! I had to wear it!
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.
the man in black travels with your soul in his pocket.
They had discovered one could grow as hungry for light as for food.
Take the dead from the dead, the old proverb said; only a corpse may speak true prophecy.
There was murder, there was rape, there were unspeakable practices, and all of them were for the good, the bloody good, the bloody myth, for the grail, for the Tower.
He understood well enough how a man with a choice between pride and responsibility will almost always choose pride–if responsibility robs him of his manhood.
The woman had looked into the abyss and then walked out across it.
He removed his unvaluable valuables and dumped his shirt, pants, and skivvies into a letter slot.
The thought process can never be complete without articulation.
People who try hard to do the right thing always seem mad.
Such grave matters as sin and forgiveness should remain between man and God
No, honey. Maybe you can put the things from the Overlook away in lockboxes, but not memories. Never those. They’re the real ghosts.
Some memories were all right, but others were dangerous.
The way those old memories kept bubbling to the surface in the present tense was disturbing. It was as if the past had never died; as if on some level of time’s great tower, everything was still happening.
Our memories have voices, too. Often sad ones that clamor like raised arms in the dark.
You pay for what you get, you own what you pay for… and sooner or later whatever you own comes back home to you.
You must be human . . . how weirdly exotic and excitingly perverse.
That— we seemed to have decided without saying a word— might go a long way toward spoiling something that was special, and beautiful, by virtue of its strangeness and delicacy.
The silence wasn’t uncomfortable or hostile but exhausted–the quiet of people who have a great deal to think about but not a hell of a lot to say.
It would not do to tell other people, not just because they wouldn’t believe but because they wouldn’t care.
What are you?”I’m the Turtle, son. I made the universe, but please don’t blame me for it; I had a bellyache.
Might as well try to drink the ocean with a spoon as argue with a lover.
Hearts can break. Yes, hearts can break. Sometimes I think it would be better if we died when they did, but we don’t.
I’m not much of a believer in the so-called character study; I think that in the end, the story should always be the boss.
I’m not much of a believer in the so-called character story; I think that in the end, the story should always be the boss.
In a democracy we sometimes have to put up with things we don’t life or approve of.
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.
A woman who would steal your love when your love was really all you had to give was not much of a woman.
Being good is commendable, but only when it is combined with doing good is it useful
It took me twenty years of living with my father to accept the idea that being good could be good enough.
If a book is not alive in the writer’s mind, it is as dead as year-old horse-shit
Sometimes the only thing to do is to take the thing that you must have. Even if someone gets hurt.
…it was amazing, wasn’t it, how bad you could hurt when there was nothing physically wrong.
And perhaps the greatest blessing was that we never knew how short the time was.
I think the best stories always end up being about the people rather than the event, which is to say character-driven.
there’s no harm in hoping for the best as long as you’re prepared for the worst.
Most people are optimists, although they may claim they are not. People who call themselves realists are often the biggest optimists of all.
When one has little faith, one must survive from day to day signs-
God and heaven lasted about four years longer than the Tooth Fairy
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.
Kill if you will, but command me nothing!’ the gunslinger roared. ‘You have forgotten the faces of those who made you!
His story is simple, because simple is always best.
A gunslinger knows pride, that invisible bone that keeps the neck stiff.
You learned to accept, or you ended up in a small room writing letters home with Crayolas.
Do you drink?””Of course,I just said I was a writer.
When asked, How do you write? I invariably answer, One word at a time.
Paths cross all the time in this world of ours, sometimes in the strangest places- Charles Jacobs
His mind is like that. On the inside, where he never smiles.
I was tired of just letting things happen to me and then feeling bad about them.
Later, with strange galaxies turning in slow gavotte overhead, neither thought the act of love had ever been so sweet, so full
He was nothing but a conduit, after all, and there isn’t a culvert in the world that remembers the water flowed through it once the rain has stopped.
Beating heroin is child’s play compared to beating your childhood.
The perception of a child who has not yet learned to protect itself by developing the tunnel vision that keeps out ninety percent of the universe.
It had been in their hands then; he was quite sure of it. But kids lose everything, kids have slippery fingers and holes in their pockets and they lose everything.
No one ever forgets a toy that made him or her supremely happy as a child, even if that toy is replaced by one like it that is much nicer.
Most kids don’t give a hoot in hell for brains; they go a penny a pound, and the kid with the high I.Q. who can’t play baseball or at least come in third in the local circle jerk is everybody’s fifth wheel.
I am what you might call a rambling man, and America is my beat.
I looked at what he built, and to me it explained the stars.
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.
For me writing has always been best when it’s intimate, as sexy as skin on skin.
It was sweet and lovely, that smile, perhaps the more so because it wasn’t complicated by much in the way of thought.
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.
Such an ego simply forbade certain lines of thought.
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.
Each year the world Rich lived in felt more and more like a huge electronic haunted house in which digital ghosts and frightened human beings lived in uneasy coexistence.
The most classic horror tale of this latter type is the Old Testament story of Job, who becomes human Astro-Turf in a kind of spiritual Superbowl between God and Satan.
Being needed is a great thing. Maybe the great thing.
It was the possibility of darkness that made the day seem so bright.
Do you believe in an afterlife?” the gunslinger asked him as Brown dropped three ears of hot corn onto his plate.Brown nodded. “I think this is it.
I want to make sure I remember what real ugly is. I might want to tell my grandchildren someday.
Shadows were too black, and when a breeze stirred the trees, the shadows changed in a disquieting way.
Teaching school is like having jumper cables hooked to your brain, draining all the juice out of you.
Of all the things which make up our Short-Time lives, sleep is surely the best.
The prosaic fact of the universe’s existence alone defeats both the pragmatist and the romantic.
The most important things to remember about back story are that (a) everyone has a history and (b) most of it isn’t very interesting.
Mrs. Cole was a perfect democrat. She hated all kids equally.
It’s hard enough for a person to keep their own socks pulled up, let alone someone else’s.
I am not the potter, nor the potter’s wheel, but the potter’s clay, does it depend on the value achieved intrinsic as much as the value of the clay as the wheel and master craftsmanship?
Zitner said hell would freeze over before something like that happened. Harold had a brief image of Adolf Hitler and Judas Iscariot handing out ice-skates and went on heaving sandbags.
May your first day in hell last ten thousand years, and may it be the shortest.
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.
The trouble with living alone, she had discovered-and the reason why most people she knew didn’t like to be alone even for a little while-was that the longer you lived alone, the louder the voices on the right side of your brain got.
Any thoughts of guilt, any feelings of regret, had faded. The desert had baked them out.
Tim Stoutheart was afraid, too,” I said. “But he went on. I expect you to do the same.
Adulthood is accretive by nature, a thing which arrives in ragged stages and uneven overlaps.
She saw clearly a boy and a man fighting for control of the same face.
I never grew up all at once. I did it one place and another along the way.
Sorry is the Kool-Aid of human emotions. It’s what you say when you spill a cup of coffee or throw a gutter ball when you’re bowling with the girls in the league. True sorrow is as rare as true love.
Animals don’t know as much about jealousy as people, but they’re not ignorant of it, either.
But the pistol, this Walther…it was as if it had been made for the express purpose of shooting people. With a chill Richie realized that was why it had been made. What else could you do with a pistol? Use it to light your cigarettes?
The sun had burned through and the day had gone from dull to dazzling, yet in the west blask-satin thunderheads continued to stack up. It was as if night has burst a blood-vessel in the sky over there.
I stood for almost an hour in a line of shuffling, bitter – eyed late mailers (Christmas is such a carefree, low – pressure time – that’s one of the things I love about it),…
There’s no bitch on earth like a mother frightened for her kids.
Everyone— black as well as white— thinks it’s going to be better over the next jump of land.
It was easier to be brave when you were someone else.
If you intend to write as truthfully as you can, your days as a member of polite society are numbered.
Can I be blunt on this subject? If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.
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.
For years I dreamed of having the sort of massive oak slab that would dominate a room…
Sometimes, the embers are better then the campfire. It’s strange, but it’s true.
Energy has a way of dissipating, you know; what can be done when you’re eleven can often never be done again.
Pardon my French if you’re a religious man.”I am,’ Bill said, grinning.’Then get outta my cab and go to fucking church,’ the cabbie said, and they both burst out laughing.
I hope he died of intestinal cancer in a part of the world where morphine is as of yet undiscovered.
She felt like Captain Ahab, for the first time sighting his great white whale.
The scholar’s greatest weakness: calling procrastination research.
Call me Richard. That’s my real name. Call me that.
He died with his tie on. Do you think that could be our generation’s equivalent of that old saying about dying with your boots on? Harry Blakemoor died with his tie on. I like it, Larry.
that this is Russian-A flu, not the more dangerous Swine flu.
I think you will find that, if you continue to write fiction, every character you create is partly you.
When you write, you want to get rid of the world, do you not? Of course you do. When you’re writing, you’re creating your own worlds.
The first draft of a book—even a long one—should take no more than three months, the length of a season.
When the work is the best work, it’s more like being a secretary than it is a creative person, you just sort of take the stuff down.
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.
There was a madness in my story, but it was a madness I understood.
And what would they find on sale? His sanity? Could be. Half-Price. Smoke and Water Damage. Everything Must Go.
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.
It’s better to be good than evil, but one achieves goodness at a tremendous cost.
…staring into thin air at thosethings only cats can see (Doctro Sleep)
But if you needed to HAVE AN IDEA, boredom could be to a roadblocked novel what chemotherapy was to a cancer patient.
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.
Hi,’ Jake said. ‘I met you earlier today, but you were a lot younger then.’ ‘I was a lot younger ten minutes ago.
..Thirty’s the end of being young, forty is where you stop fooling yourself.
You’re a dangerous fool who should be sent west,” he told the unconscious man. “You have forgotten the face of your father.
And, instead of pelting these babbling idiots with their own freshly toasted marshmallows, everyone else sitting around the fire is often nodding and smiling and looking solemny thoughtful.
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…
It didn´t occur to me until later that there´s another truth, very simple: greed in a good cause is still greed.
Why is it that so many people think all the answers are in their wallet?
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.
You need to take out the stuff that’s just sitting there and doing nothing. No slackers allowed! All meat, no filler!
… when editors were flattered, they would sometimes give in on some of their mad ideas.
Only God gets it right the first time and only a slob says, “Oh well, let it go, that’s what copyeditors are for.
Life is more than love and pleasure,I came to dig for treasure.If you want to play, you gotta pay,You know it’s always been that wayWe all came digging for treasure.
It’s like practicing pole vaulting your entire life, and then getting to the olympics and saying, ‘what the hell did I want to jump over this stupid bar for?
And there he would either be mercifully annihilated or live forever, insane and yet conscious inside It’s homicidal endless formless hungry being.
You discarded most of the lies along the way but held on to the one that said life mattered.
Horace, like all dogs, heard dead-voices quite often, and sometimes saw their owners.
Talent is cheaper than table salt. What separates the talented individual from the successful one is a lot of hard work.
Allie sighed. It was an old yellow sound, like turning pages.
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.
…he was after all, a novelist…and a novelist was simply a fellow who got paid to tell lies. The bigger the lies, the better the pay.
He had discovered that there was not just one God but many, and some were more than cruel — they were insane, and that changed all. Cruelty, after all, was understandable. With insanity, however, there was no arguing.
Anything with the power to make you laugh over thirty years later isn’t a waste of time. I think something like that is very close to immortality.
The sun had bled away every smell and left nothing.
For a woman a man will do many things that he’d turn his back on in an instant when alone; things he’d back away from, nine times out of ten, even when drunk adn with a bunch of his friends egging him on.
So what, ghosts can’t hurt you. That’s what I thought then.
The Dark Powers have to give before they can take.
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Fool me three times, shame on both of us.
The sky was the yellow color of old cheese and the clouds flew across it, as if they had seen something horrifying in the desert wastes where they had so lately been.
The sky of the color of ashes in the east and embers in the west.
I’m going crazy, Louis thought wonderingly. Wheeeeee!
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.
The hardest for man is lie to himself between 3:00 and 6:00 in the morning.
What sad, short lives humans live! Each life a short pamphlet written by an idiot! Tut-tut, and all that.
One of life’s great truths is this: when one is about to be struck by a speeding six-hundred pound Coke machine, one need worry about little else.
Well, luck is for fools. It’s all they have to hope for, poor devils.
There came a time when you realised that moving on was pointless. That you took yourself with you wherever you went.
Thinking, Garraty thought. That’s the day’s business. Thinking. Thinking and isolation, because it doesn’t matter if you pass the time of day with someone or not; in the end, you’re alone.
To the champ, everything is serious business. I’m hoping that he’ll live long enough to learn that in this world that is a very dangerous attitude.
Disappointment was never a thing you looked for, but it had a wonderful way of clearing the mind.
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.
It’s as if God gave you something-all those stories- and said, “Here you are. Try not to lose it.” But children lose everything unless somebody is there to help them, and if your parents are too stupid to do it, maybe i ought to.
I guess a sock is also a geometric shape—technically—but I don’t know what you’d call it. A socktagon?
The feel of the sticky wetness down there when she moved made her grimace. God, she wanted to get cleaned up. In a hurry.
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.
I’m going out for a bottle of champagne. We’re going to get bombed.
Both Rowling and Meyer, they’re speaking directly to young people. … The real difference is that Jo Rowling is a terrific writer and Stephenie Meyer can’t write worth a darn. She’s not very good.
You’re like a man who loves nothing better than a thick steak but wouldn’t last an hour in a slaughterhouse.
She gave him a strange maternal grin.For the first time, clearly, the thought surfaced in Paul Sheldon’s mind: I am introuble here. This woman is not right.
The reason authors almost always put a dedication on a book is, because their selfishness even horrifies themselves in the end.
Tony, Tony,come around, something’s lost that can’t be found.
Yeah, but what if you went back and killed your own grandfather?”He stared at me, baffled. “Why the fuck would you do that?
Can the future hsitory of the world be so fragile that it will not allow two high school teachers to meet and fall in love? To marry, to dance to Beatles tunes like “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” and live unremarkable lives?
History doesn’t repeat itself, but it harmonizes, and what it usually makes is the devil’s music.
College was for people who didn’t know they were smart.
Outside, daylight was bleeding slowly toward dusk.
Faith is, by its very definition, belief without proof.
And this wasn’t lying, not really. It was leaving out.
In the years since, I’ve discovered there’s a lot to be said for boredom.
Anyone who thinks impressions of old movie actors is funny absolutely cannot be trusted. I think it’s like a law of nature.
[Prison Break is] one of the craziest, most unpredictable roller-coaster rides on TV today.
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.
The wide corridor up the centre of E Block was floored with linoleum the colour of tired old limes, and so what was the Last Mile at other prisons was called the Green Mile at Cold Mountain.
A left turn meant life – if you called what went on in the sunbaked exercise yard life, and many did; many lived it for years, with no apparent ill effects.
When you spend your life taking care of mudmen, you can’t help getting a little dirty yourself.
I hated high school. I don’t trust anybody who looks back on the years from 14 to 18 with any enjoyment. If you liked being a teenager, there’s something wrong with you.
When teenagers aren’t turning like weathervanes in a high wind, they’re as stiff as Puritans.
If a man dethrones God in his heart, Satan must ascend to His position.
I am not the potter, not the potter’s wheel, but the potter’s clay; is not the value of the shape attained as dependent upon the intrinsic worth of the clay as upon the wheel and the Master’s skill?
…some of it’s how he acts like he’s King Shit of Turd Mountain, but mostly it’s that he’s sneaky, and he likes to hurt
Also, I’m angry. I know life is hard, I think everyone knows that in their hearts, but why does it have to be cruel, as well? Why does it have to bite?
I’m a salami writer. I try to write good salami but salami is salami.
I’m a salami writer. I try to write good salami but salami is salami.
Being sorry for myself is a luxury I can’t afford.
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.
Shit. The mind gets up to funny tricks, doesn’t it? Shadows grow faces.
And as a writer, one of the things that I’ve always been interested in doing is actually invading your comfort space. Because that’s what we’re supposed to do. Get under your skin, and make you react.
When his life was ruined, his family killed, his farm destroyed, Job knelt down on the ground and yelled up to the heavens, ‘Why god? Why me?’ and the thundering voice of God answered, ‘There’s just something about you that pisses me off.’
I was in enough to get along with people. I was never socially inarticulate. Not a loner. And that saved my life, saved my sanity. That and the writing. But to this day I distrust anybody who thought school was a good time. Anybody.
When asked, ‘How do you write?’ I invariably answer, ‘one word at a time.’
If you don’t have the time to read, you don’t have the time or the tools to write.
Every book you pick up has its own lesson or lessons, and quite often the bad books have more to teach than the good ones.
It’s a mystery. That’s the first thing that interests me about the idea of God. If there is one, it’s mysterious and powerful and awesome to even consider the concept, and you have to take it seriously.
Americans are apocalyptic by nature. The reason why is that we’ve always had so much, so we live in deadly fear that people are going to take it away from us.
Only enemies speak the truth; friends and lovers lie endlessly, caught in the web of duty.
The trust of the innocent is the liar’s most useful tool.
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.
I guess when you turn off the main road, you have to be prepared to see some funny houses.
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.
We’ve switched from a culture that was interested in manufacturing, economics, politics – trying to play a serious part in the world – to a culture that’s really entertainment-based.
And in real life endings aren’t always neat, whether they’re happy endings, or whether they’re sad endings.
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.
Life is like a wheel. Sooner or later, it always come around to where you started again.
French is the language that turns dirt into romance.
I watched Titanic when I got back home from the hospital, and cried. I knew that my IQ had been damaged.
I never saw any of my dad’s stories. My mother said he had piles and piles of manuscripts.