There were times . . . when it occurred to me that I was repeating my mother’s life. Usually this thought struck me as funny. But if I happened to be tired, or if there...

Well, luck is for fools. It’s all they have to hope for, poor devils.

That wasn’t any act of God. That was an act of pure human fuckery.

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.

PRECOGNITION, TELEPATHY, BULLSHIT! EAT MY DONG, YOU EXTRASENSORY TURKEY!

you must not come lightly to the blank page.

‎If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot…reading is the creative center of a writer’s life…you cannot hope to sweep someone...

And as I thought about the body of Ray Brower in this light- or lack of it- what I felt was not queasiness or fear that he would suddenly appear before us, a green and...

And sometimes before I went to sleep I’d think: This is how, this is how you pay off bein’ a bitch. And it ain’t no use sayin’ if you haven’t been a bitch you wouldn’t...

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?

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 never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was 12 – Jesus, did you?

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.

Never will you talk to me like that again.

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.

the man in black travels with your soul in his pocket.

Being good is commendable, but only when it is combined with doing good is it useful

Murder is like potato chips: you can’t stop with just one.

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...

When teenagers aren’t turning like weathervanes in a high wind, they’re as stiff as Puritans.

Just the act of cooking made her feel better, because cooking was life.

There’s always someone who knows something.

How does it happen that a writer who’s not even very good – and I can say that, I’ve read four or five of his books – gets to be in charge of the world’s...

When you write, you want to get rid of the world, do you not? Of coarse you do. When you’re writing, you’re creating your own worlds.

We never know which lives we influence, or when, or why.

Some of these guys will go on walking long after the laws of biochemistry and handicapping have gone by the boards. There was a guy last year that crawled for two miles at four miles...

Writing isn’t about making money, getting famous, getting dates, getting laid, or making friends. In the end, it’s about enriching the lives of those who will read your work, and enriching your own life, as...

The glory of a good tale is that it is limitless and fluid; a good tale belongs to each reader in its own particular way.

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.

…fear is actually an acronym for Fuck Everything And Run.

the late afternoon sunlight, warm as oil, sweet as childhood …

I deal in lead! Roland called, and Eddie felt goose-bumps pebble his arms.

When certain seeds are planted, they nearly always grow.

O te consagras a vivir o te dedicas a morir.

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...

Questa volta la voce non venne dalla luna. Questa volta venne da sotto il letto.

Some werewolves are hairy on the inside.

He removed his unvaluable valuables and dumped his shirt, pants, and skivvies into a letter slot.

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.

Animals don’t know as much about jealousy as people, but they’re not ignorant of it, either.

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...

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...

I hope he died of intestinal cancer in a part of the world where morphine is as of yet undiscovered.

I’m going out for a bottle of champagne. We’re going to get bombed.

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.

If you don’t have the time to do something right, where are you going to find the time to fix it?

The world was full of monsters, and they were all allowed to bite the innocent and the unwary

It don’t matter if you believe in God Nick, he believes in you.

I have spent a good many years since―too many, I think―being ashamed about what I write. I think I was forty before I realized that almost every writer of fiction or poetry who has ever...

As it happened, all three of us turned out to be real writers–a coincidence almost too large to be termed mere coincidence in a society where literally tens of thousands (maybe hundreds of thousands) of...