oh shit it’s shit

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

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...

I don’t believe in any actual thinking God that marks the fall of every bird in Australia or every bug in India, a God that records all of our sins in a big golden book...

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...

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...

Talent is a wonderful thing, but it won’t carry a quitter.

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...

In North Carolina, I stopped to gas up at a Humble Oil station, then walked around the corner to use the toilet. There were two doors and three signs. MEN was neatly stenciled over one...

…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...

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.

Grief is like a drunken house guest, always coming back for one more goodbye hug.

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?

Die steinerne Verstocktheit barst, darunter kam die Fratze eines bis zum Irrsinn wütenden Kindes zum Vorschein

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

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...

A man’s life was five dogs long, Cortland believed. The first was the one that taught you. The second was the one you taught. The third and fourth were the ones you worked. The last...

But he went on. I expect you to do the same.

La verdad no es realmente más extraña que la ficción, digan lo que digan. La mayoria de la veces uno sabe exactamente como van a salir las cosas.-Paul

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?

Danny strolled to the town common, sat on one of the benches in Teenytown and took one of the bottles out of the bag, looking down on it like Hamlet with Yorick’s skull

In retrospect, this seems to summarize all the insanity of that time. Guy is standing on top of a burning building. Helicopter arrives, hovers, drops a rope ladder. Climb up! the man leaning out of...

You know what talent is? The curse of expectation. As a kid you have to deal with that, beat it somehow. If you can write, you think God put you on earth to blow Shakespeare...

All right. Here’s the deal, bigshot: suck my cock. Do that and I’ll let you go. Straight trade.”He unzipped his fly and pulled down the elastic front of his shorts. Something that looked like a...

Time takes it all, whether you want it to or not.

The greatest mystery the universe offers is not life but Size.

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

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...

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....

Friendships founded on laughter are always fortuitous.

It’s a hard life if you don’t weaken.

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...

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

Paths cross all the time in this world of our, sometimes in the strangest places.

It’s best to be ruthless with the past.

In the end, though, it’s all about giving back the teeth that the current ‘sweetie-vamp’ craze has, by and large, stolen from the bloodsuckers. It’s about making them scary again.

Roland of Gilead responded as he ever had and ever would when such useless, mystifying questions were raised: ‘Ka.

In a democracy we sometimes have to put up with things we don’t life or approve of.

I think the best stories always end up being about the people rather than the event, which is to say character-driven.

And perhaps the greatest blessing was that we never knew how short the time was.

True sorrow is as rare as true love.

College was for people who didn’t know they were smart.

If I show up at your house ten years from now and find nothing in your living room but The Readers Digest, nothing on your bedroom night table but the newest Dan Brown novel, and...

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.

Laughter, Susannah would later reflect, is like a hurricane: once it reaches a certain point, it becomes self-feeding, self-supporting. You laugh not because the jokes are funny but because your own condition is funny.

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?

Fault always lies in the same place: with him weak enough to lay blame.

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!

A short story is a different thing all together – a short story is like a kiss in the dark from a stranger.

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.