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.

Shadows were too black, and when a breeze stirred the trees, the shadows changed in a disquieting way.

A dor era como um pontão velho, por vezes estava encoberto, e outras, visível, mas sempre presente.

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...

¡Te voy a matar! Y, te lo aseguro, si Dios me lo permite, te mataré dos veces.

The last good time always comes

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.

They’re animals, all right. But why are you so goddam sure that makes us human beings?

We have once again succeeded in destroying what we could not create.

The scariest moment is always just before you start.

Kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your darlings.

…writers are often the worst judges of what they have written.

Eddie discovered one of his childhood’s great truths. Grownups are the real monsters, he thought.

Good books are for consideration after, too.

That was what I wanted, but I don’t need it to be gone. I can love you and I can love life and bear the pain all at the same time. I think the pain...

There’s no room for anything but joy and fear, and joy ruled the house. Fear lived in the shack out back!

Time’s the thief of memory

Por la noche los pensamientos tienen la desagradable costumbre de escapar de su correa y correr libremente.

I discovered news of old horrors in old books; read intelligence of old atrocities in old periodicals; always in the back of my mind, every day a bit louder, I heard the seashell drone of...

People who try hard to do the right thing always seem mad.

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.

Life could sometimes be grand.

Adulthood is accretive by nature, a thing which arrives in ragged stages and uneven overlaps.

There’a a phrase, “the elephant in the living room”, which purports to describe what it’s like to live with a drug addict, an alcoholic, an abuser. People outside such relationships will sometimes ask, “How could...

There were people who lied for gain, people who lied from pain, people who lied simply because the concept of telling the truth was utterly alien to them . . . and then there were...

How much courage does it take to fire up your tractor and plow under a crop you spent six or seven years growing?’ he asked himself. ‘How much courage to go on and do that...

Women’s lib, Frannie had decided, was nothing more nor less than an outgrowth of the technological society. Women were at the mercy of their bodies. They were smaller. They tended to be weaker. A man...

For me writing has always been best when it’s intimate, as sexy as skin on skin.

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...

Do any of us, except in our dreams, truly expect to be reunited with our hearts’ deepest loves, even when they leave us only for minutes, and on the most mundane of errands? No, not...

You always know the truth, because when you cut yourself or someone else with it, there’s always a bloody show.

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

So okay― there you are in your room with the shade down and the door shut and the plug pulled out of the base of the telephone. You’ve blown up your TV and committed yourself...

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.

Oh no, praying is great, without it the thumbscrews and the Iron Maiden probably never would have been invented.

And when there are enough outsiders together in one place, a mystic osmosis takes place and you’re inside.

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.

If you fell outward to the limit of the universe, would you find a board fence and signs reading DEAD END? No. You might find something hard and rounded, as the chick must see the...

A person can’t change all at once.

Sometimes she’d go a whole day without thinking of him or missing him. Why not? She had quite a full life, and really, he’d often been hard to deal with and hard to live with....

Give me just enough information so that I can lie convincingly.

Moonlight flooded in the windows and silvered the room, turning it into a lagoon of dreams

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.

Later, with strange galaxies turning in slow gavotte overhead, neither thought the act of love had ever been so sweet, so full

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,...

It was the possibility of darkness that made the day seem so bright.

You’re like a man who loves nothing better than a thick steak but wouldn’t last an hour in a slaughterhouse.

I think that we’re all mentally ill. Those of us outside the asylums only hide it a little better – and maybe not all that much better after all.

In the end, we wear out our worries.

..Thirty’s the end of being young, forty is where you stop fooling yourself.