Here is one of the great truths of the human condition: when you need Stayfree Maxi Pads to absorb the expectorants produced by your insulted body, you are in serious fucking trouble.

I wouldn’t have missed a single minute of it, Not for the whole world.

You’re dead, George. You just don’t have the sense to lie down.

If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.

I am always chilled and astonished by the would-be writers who ask me for advice and admit, quite blithely, that they “don’t have time to read.” This is like a guy starting up Mount Everest...

Fantasy fiction is essentially about the concept of power; great fantasy fiction is about people who find it at great cost or lose it tragically; mediocre fantasy fiction is about people who have it and...

The 3 types of terror: The Gross-out: the sight of a severed head tumbling down a flight of stairs, it’s when the lights go out and something green and slimy splatters against your arm. The...

You want to remember that while you’re judging the book, the book is also judging you.

The pain was brilliant, like a poisonous inspiration.

Money talks, bullshit walks.

Your friends drag you down, Gordie. Don’t you know that? […] Your friends do. They’re like drowning guys that are holding onto your legs. You can’t save them. You can only drown with them.

Not everybody believes in ghosts, but I do. Do you know what they are, Trisha?She had shaken her head slowly.Men and women who can’t get over their past . . . That’s what ghosts are.

Deep inside her (ih her harrowed soul) she felt a glowing ember of fury at the man responsible for this. Tha man who had put her in this position. She looked at the pistol lying...

It would not do to tell other people, not just because they wouldn’t believe but because they wouldn’t care.

They were close to the end of the beginning . . .

Time takes it all whether you want it to or not, time takes it all. Time bares it away, and in the end there is only darkness. Sometimes we find others in that darkness, and...

Teaching school is like having jumper cables hooked to your brain, draining all the juice out of you.

The trouble with living alone, she had discovered-and the reason why most people she knew didn’t like to be alone even for a little while-was that the longer you lived alone, the louder the voices...

Wanting more is just a recipe for heartache.

He did it (listened) as the world’s most charming and magnetic people do, always asking the right question at the right time, never fidgeting or taking his eyes from the speaker’s face, making the other...

Rightly tired of the pain İ hear and feel, boss… where we’s comin from or goin to or why… If İ could end it, İ would. But İ can’t.

Some things were better lost than found.

The sun had bled away every smell and left nothing.

He who speaks without an attentive ear is mute.

Twas something else. I had come to hate her, you see. I had come to wish her dead, and that was what held me back.

Write with the door closed, rewrite with the door open.

No, it’s not a very good story – its author was too busy listening to other voices to listen as closely as he should have to the one coming from inside.

I gradually realized that I was seeing another example of creative ebb, another step by another art on the road that may indeed end in extinction.

I’m convinced that fear is at the root of most bad writing. If one is writing for one’s own pleasure, that fear may be mild — timidity is the word I’ve used here. If, however,...

Do you see this heart-stopping beauty? Look closely, because in a moment your heart will stop.

…She helped me find my heart when I thought my heart was gone.

The fundamental difference between the sexes is this: men make assumptions, but women rarely do.

But now the joy is gone and the sadness is back, the sadness feels like something deserved, the price of some not-quite-forgotten betrayal.

I believe in evil, but all my life I’ve gone back and forth about whether or not there’s an outside evil, whether or not there’s a force in the world that really wants to destroy...

The terror, which would not end for another twenty-eight years–if it ever did end–began, so far as I know or can tell, with a boat made from a sheet of newspaper floating down a gutter...

He lay back, put his arm over his eyes, and tried to hold onto the anger, because the anger made him feel brave. A brave man could think. A coward couldn’t.

Tyler rolls out of bed, sniffs the armpits of yesterday’s T-shirt, tosses it aside, gets another out of the drawer. His dad sometimes asks him why he sets his alarm so early — it’s summer...

Sometimes home is where the heart is, Eddie thought randomly. I believe that. Old Bobby Frost said home’s the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in. Unfortunately, it’s...

Most people are sheep and sheep don’t eat meat

She was crazy but he needed her. Oh I am in so much trouble he thought, and stared blindly up at the ceiling as the droplets of sweat began to gather on his forehead again.

When you spend your life taking care of mudmen, you can’t help getting a little dirty yourself.

The universe (he said) offers a paradox too great for the finite mind to grasp. As the living brain cannot conceive of a nonliving brain — although it may think it can — the finite...

Read a lot, write a lot is the great commandment.

It didn´t occur to me until later that there´s another truth, very simple: greed in a good cause is still greed.

Do any men grow up or do they only come of age?

I think part of being a parent is trying to kill your kids.

A successful marriage was a balancing act-that was a thing everyone knew. A successful marriage was also dependent on a high tolerance for irritation.

Christ.No, not Christ. These leavings were made in propitiation of a much older God than the Christian one. People have called Him different things at different times, but Rachel’s sister gave Him a perfectly good...

The trick is to teach yourself to read in small sips as well as long swallows.

Reading takes time, and the glass teat takes too much of it.