Most people are optimists, although they may claim they are not. People who call themselves realists are often the biggest optimists of all.

As Wendy watched them they burst into a chord of tinkling, girlish laughter. She felt a smile touch her own lips; not one of them could be under sixty.

…Elizabeth’s doze had deepened into real sleep. Once she might have been young and beautiful. Once she might have been some young man’s dream baby. Now she was snoring with her mostly toothless mouth pointed...

What you love, you must love all the harder because someday it will be gone.

Better to be dirty than dead.

Language does not always have to wear a tie and lace-up shoes. The object of fiction isn’t grammatical correctness but to make the reader welcome and then tell a story … to make him/her forget,...

love is what moves the world, I’ve always thought…it is the only thing which allows men and women to stand in a world where gravity always seems to want to pull them down…bring them low…and...

Words have weight.

At the end of her life she was aware of heat but not pain. She had time to consider his eyes, eyes of that blue which is the color of the sky at first light...

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 what it expects. If you intend to write as truthfully...

The writer must have a good imagination to begin with, but the imagination has to be muscular, which means it must be exercised in a disciplined way, day in and day out, by writing, failing,...

Every man or woman who loves Him, they hate Him too, because He’s a hard God, a jealous God.

Do they see the lethal insanity of a race to the brink of oblivion, and then over the edge? Apparently not. If they did, surely they wouldn’t be racing to begin with. Or is it...

When I say truth, I mean beauty.

For a moment he felt a wild hope: perhaps this really was a nightmare. Perhaps he would awake in his own bed, bathed in sweat, shaking, maybe even crying . . . but alive. Safe....

He struck his temples with his fists and screamed: ‘Haven’t you ever seen a goddam DC converter? You can get them at Radio Shack for three bucks! Are you seriously trying to tell me you...

Sometimes God dillies and dallies, and sometimes he just points at you and tells you to hang up your jock.

We make up horrors to help us cope with the real ones.

There is no life here but the slow death of days, and so when the evil falls on the town, its coming seems almost preordained, sweet and morphic. It is almost as though the town...

Maybe there’s a whole other universe where a square moon rises in the sky, and the stars laugh in cold voices, and some of the triangles have four sides, and some have five, and some...

Hearts can break. Yes, hearts can break. Sometimes I think it would be better if we died when they did, but we don’t.

Call me Richard. That’s my real name. Call me that.

la buena literatura podía ser embriagadora sin renunciar al hilo conductor de las ideas.

When Annie’s treatin, you best be eatin.

Both Rowling and Meyer, they’re speaking directly to young people. … The real difference is that Jo Rowling is a terrific writer and Stephenie Meyer can’t write worth a darn. She’s not very good.

Sometimes, the embers are better then the campfire. It’s strange, but it’s true.

… what I’m doing in here isn’t all that different from what I was doing outside. I’ll hand you a pretty cynical axiom: the amount of financial help an individual or company needs rises in...

La follia è quando non riesci più a distinguere le cuciture che tengono insieme il mondo.

Any good marriage is secret territory, a necessary white space on society’s map. What others don’t know about it is what makes it yours.

Oh shit, the mummy’s after us, let’s all walk a little faster

This inhuman place makes human monsters.

Andy Dufresne: ‘That’s the beauty of music. They can’t get that from you…haven’t you ever felt that way about music?’Red: ‘I played a mean harmonica as a younger man. Lost interest in it though. Didn’t...

If you write books, you go on one page at a time. We turn from all we know and all we fear. We study catalogues, watch football games, choose Sprint over AT&T. We count the...

I am, when you stop to think of it, a member of a fairly select group: the final handful of American novelists who learned to read and write before they learned to eat a daily...

I think that real friendship always makes us feel such sweet gratitude, because the world almost always seems like a very hard desert, and the flowers that grow there seem to grow against such high...

Creo que todo sueño que se repite tiene algo de misterioso, pues nos hace percatarnos de que el inconsciente está cavando obsesivamente para desenterrar un objeto que se niega a salir.

Several times we had been very close to “it,” but “it” just never quite happened. She always drew back, and I never pressed her. God help me, I was being gallant. I have wondered often...

It is completely raw, the sort of thing I feel free to do with the door shut—it’s the story undressed, standing up in nothing but its socks and undershorts.

People don’t get better, they just get smarter. When you get smarter you don’t stop pulling the wings off flies, you just think of better reasons for doing it.

I thought there would be time, but we always think stuff like that, don’t we? We fool ourselves so much we could do it for a living.

stop now before i kill youa word to the wise from your friendPENNYWISE

Time and tide wait for no man.

The way those old memories kept bubbling to the surface in the present tense was disturbing. It was as if the past had never died; as if on some level of time’s great tower, everything...

The old sleep poorly. Perhaps they stand watch.

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