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...

Everybody trusts a guy in a raincoat. I don’t know why. It’s just one of those mystery facts.

The muses are ghosts, and sometimes they come uninvited.

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.

Louis was often struck by Gage’s speech, not because it was cute, but because he thought that small children all sounded like immigrants learning a foreign language in some helter-skelter but fairly amiable way. He...

It was really amazing the number of hard hits from which a mind could recover.

His so-fucking-vivid imagination rarely gave him the horrors, but when it did, God help him. God help him once it was warmed up. It was not only warmed up now, it was hot and running...

I am your number one fan.

I can see your dirtypillows.

The thought process can never be complete without articulation.

Conocía las respuestas a casi todas las preguntas que él mismo formulaba. Así la vida era más sencilla.

Valuables. That was a hot one, Richards thought, unbuttoning his shirt. He had an empty wallet with a few pictures of Sheila and Cathy, a receipt for a shoe sole he had replaced at the...

It’s hard enough for a person to keep their own socks pulled up, let alone someone else’s.

Ya no se trataba sólo de «,Puedes?» para empezar el libro. Por primera vez en muchos años, escuchaba aquella pregunta casi cada día y… estaba descubriendo que podía.

En esos momentos se había puesto a escribir, no porque tuviese que hacerlo, sino porque era una forma de escapar de los problemas.

Baseball is also a game of balance.

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.

So what, ghosts can’t hurt you. That’s what I thought then.

A little arrogance (or even a lot) isn’t such a bad thing, although your mother undoubtedly told you different. Mine did. “Pride goeth before a fall, Stephen”, she said… and then I found out –...

What we like to think of ourselves and what we really are rarely have much in common….

Sometimes dead is better

You ought to sue that son of a whore

Almost everyone can remember losing his or her virginity, and most writers can remember the first book he/she put down thinking: I can do better than this. Hell, I am doing better than this! What...

remember Stephen King’s First Rule of Writers and Agents, learned by bitter personal experience: You don’t need one until you’re making enough for someone to steal … and if you’re making that much, you’ll be...

I’m sorry, I’m sorry, please, I’m suh-suh-SORRY—” And then they were around him, his friends, and no one lit a match, and someone held him, he didn’t know who, Beverly maybe, or maybe Ben, or...

Books are a uniquely portable magic.

Pain is the biggest power of love.” That’s what Wireman says.

Why is it that so many people think all the answers are in their wallet?

Friends come in and out of our lives, like busboys in a restaurant.

What our parents tell us when we are small seldom goes ignored, no matter how foolish it may be

You have the right to remain silent,’ the big cop said in his robot’s voice. ‘If you do not choose to remain silent, anything you say may be used against you in a court of...

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.

They had discovered one could grow as hungry for light as for food.

What you don’t know, you can’t tell. Or made to tell.

…staring into thin air at thosethings only cats can see (Doctro Sleep)

Solo. Sí, esa es la palabra clave, la palabra más tremenda. Asesino no le llega a los talones, e infierno no es más que un pálido sinónimo.

In the years since, I’ve discovered there’s a lot to be said for boredom.

Sometimes human places, create inhuman monsters.

You might question a winkle – a feeling that came to you right out of the blue – but you didn’t question knowing.

Of course, the writer can impose control; It’s just a really shitty idea. Writing controlled fiction is called “plotting.” Buckling your seatbelt and letting the story take over, however… that is called “storytelling.” Storytelling is...

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Fool me three times, shame on both of us.

To write is human, to edit is divine.

Garraty wondered how it would be, to lie in the biggest, dustiest library silence of all, dreaming endless, thoughtless dreams behind your gummed-down eyelids, dressed forever in your Sunday suit. No worries about money, success,...

Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule.

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...

But in the wake of ‘Bullet,’ all the guys wanted to know was, ‘How’s it doing? How’s it selling?’ How to tell them I didn’t give a flying fuck how it was doing in the...

Andy was the part of me they could never lock up, the part of me that will rejoice when the gates finally open for me and I walk out in my cheap suit with my...

she might have been pretty when she started out, but the world had moved on since then.

It was how wars really ended, Dieffenbaker supposed — not at truce tables but in cancer wards and office cafeterias and traffic jams. Wars died one tiny piece at a time, each piece something that...

Men! She could not understand why so many women feared them. Hadn’t the gods made them with the most vurnerable part of their guts hanging right out of their bodies, like a misplaced bit of...