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

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.

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...

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.

Description is what makes the reader a sensory participant in the story. Good description is a learned skill,one of the prime reasons you cannot succeed unless you read a lot and write a lot. It’s not just a question of how-to, you see; it’s a question of how much to. Reading will help you answer...

I have seen many cases like N. during the five years I’ve been in practice. I sometimes picture these unfortunates as men and women being pecked to death by predatory birds. The birds are invisible – at least until a psychiatrist who is good, or lucky, or both, sprays them with his version of Luminol...

Like all sweet dreams, it will be brief, but brevity makes sweetness, doesn’t it?

It’s a wholly illogical but nonetheless powerful belief that things will change for the better in a new place; that the urge to self-destruct will magically disappear.

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

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.

He’s dead?’ Vera asked. ‘He’s dead? Johnny’s dead?’He covered the mouthpiece. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Not dead.”Not dead! Not dead!’ she cried, and fell on her knees in the phone nook with an audible thud. ‘O God we most heartily thank Thee and ask that You show Thy tender care and loving mercy to our son...

Oh Christ, he groaned to himself, if this is the stuff adults have to think about I never want to grow up

The exhilaration was hard to explain. It was a lonely feeling — a somehow melancholy feeling. He was outside; he passed on the wings of the wind, and none of the people beyond the brightly lighted squares of their windows saw him. They were inside, inside where there was light and warmth. They didn’t know...

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.

God and heaven lasted about four years longer than the Tooth Fairy

Larry was drawn two painful ways by these things. Part of him clamored at their sad and blatant ugliness and at the ugliness of the minds that had turned this section of a magnificent, savage coastline into one long highway amusement park for families in station wagons. But there was a more subtle, deeper part...

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.

Están un poco usados, pero es señal de que un libro ha sido leído y amado, ,no es así? – Annie

The past is obdurate.

She had probably referred to herself as Mrs. Scott Landon less than half a dozen times in all the years of her married life, and never once during the twenty-six months of her widowhood. It wasn’t hard to understand why she had done so now. It was what Scott called “the fame-card,” and he himself...

For years I dreamed of having the sort of massive oak slab that would dominate a room…

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.

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.

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.

Fiction is the truth inside the lie.

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.

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

If a fear cannot be articulated, it can’t be conquered.

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.

His legs, now unsplinted but as crooked and ugly as something glimpsed through a rip in the canvas of a freak-show tent, hung down. The left, with the salt-dome where the knee had been, was fully four inches shorter than the right. He had tried standing on the right leg and had found he could,...

Monsters are real and ghosts are real too they live inside us and sometimes they win.

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?

Love, the simplest, strongest, and most unforgiving of all emotions.

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

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.

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.

What he knows now is that guilt isn’t the only reason people commit suicide. Sometimes you can just get bored with afternoon TV.

In a book, all would have gone according to plan… but life was so fucking untidy — what could you say for an existence where some of the most crucial conversations of your life took place when you needed to take a shit, or something? An existence where there weren’t even any chapters?

there’s no harm in hoping for the best as long as you’re prepared for the worst.

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...

Nobody likes to see a stupid guy wise up.

No conseguiría zafarse del terror que se había apoderado de su corazón. Tendría que aprender a aceptarlo.

It’s better to be good than evil, but one achieves goodness at a tremendous cost.

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.

Calling it a simple schoolgirl crush was like saying a Rolls-Royce was a vehicle with four wheels, something like a hay-wagon. She did not giggle wildly and blush when she saw him, nor did she chalk his name on trees or write it on the walls of the Kissing Bridge. She simply lived with his...

A person can go along quite awhile if they get a good day every once and again.

He held her and rocked her, believing, rightly or wrongly, that Ellie wept for the very intractability of death, its imperviousness to argument or to a little girl’s tears; that she wept over its cruel unpredictability; and that she wept because of the human being’s wonderful, deadly ability to translate symbols into conclusions that were...

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.

Sometimes stories cry out to be told in such loud voices that you write them just to shut them up.

I can’t understand why people use religion to hurt each other when there’s already so much pain in the world.