God makes it all come right in the end, that’s what Johnnie told Dock Barker just before we parted company. I was raised a Christian-I admit I fell away a bit along my journey-and I...

A boy who once wiped his ass with poison ivy probably doesn’t belong in a smart people’s club.

The truth has to come out, that’s the basis of art. But that’s not to say the world must see it. Be brave. Don’t be afraid to draw the secret things. No one said art...

Remember, Hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies.

If you wrote something for which someone sent you a check, if you cashed the check and it didn’t bounce, and if you then paid the light bill with the money, I consider you talented.

Many writing texts caution against asking friends to read your stuff, suggesting you’re not apt to get a very unbiased opinion[.] … It’s unfair, according to this view, to put a pal in such a...

Friends don’t spy; true friendship is about privacy, too.

You grew up, became a man, had to adjust to taking less than you hoped for; you discovered the dream-machine had a big OUT OF ORDER sign on it.

What I know now is that gallant young men rarely get pussy. Put it on a sampler and hang it in your kitchen.

…and still the hands did their trick, like over-eager dogs that want to do their rolling—over trick for you not once or twice but all night.

The idea that the creative endeavor and mind-altering substances are entwined is one of the great pop-intellectual myths of our time. … Substance abusing writers are just substance abusers — common garden variety drunks and...

It always comes down to just two choices. Get busy living, or get busy dying.

The things a man sees when he ain’t got a gun.–Watson the Caretaker

The world’s a hard place, Danny. It don’t care. It don’t hate you and me, but it don’t love us, either. Terrible things happen in the world, and they’re things no one can explain. Good...

You must be human . . . how weirdly exotic and excitingly perverse.

Of all the things which make up our Short-Time lives, sleep is surely the best.

Do you drink?””Of course,I just said I was a writer.

I want to make sure I remember what real ugly is. I might want to tell my grandchildren someday.

—Sonidos de arañazos, señor, suena como si ella aún estuviese viva allá abajo tratando de abrirse camino con las uñas hasta la tierra de los vivos, eso parece.

Someone you knew in another life, honey.

If a man dethrones God in his heart, Satan must ascend to His position.

Rings and magazines; keychains and umbrellas; hats and glasses; rattles and radios. They looked like different things, but Ralph thought they were really all the same thing: the faint, sorrowing voices of people who had...

Thinking, Garraty thought. That’s the day’s business. Thinking. Thinking and isolation, because it doesn’t matter if you pass the time of day with someone or not; in the end, you’re alone.

I wanted to say goodbye to someone, and have someone say goodbye to me. The goodbyes we speak and the goodbyes we hear are the goodbyes that tell us we´re still alive.

The monster nevers dies.

The most important things are the hardest to say. They are the things you get ashamed of, because words diminish them — words shrink things that seemed limitless when they were in your head to...

You can approach the act of writing with nervousness, excitement, hopefulness, or despair … Come to it any way but lightly.

Symbolism exists to adorn and enrich, not to create an artificial sense of profundity.

Love didn’t grow very well in a place where there was only fear

Books are the perfect entertainment: no commercials, no batteries,hours of enjoyment for each dollar spent.

Every man or woman who loves [God], they hate Him too, because He’s a hard God, a jealous God, He Is, what He Is, and in this world He’s apt to repay service with pain...

Read sometimes for the story, Bobby. Don’t be like the book-snobs who won’t do that. Read sometimes for the words – the language. Don’t be like the play-it-safers that won’t do that. But when you...

Like some dogs: kick them once and they never trust you again, no matter how nice you are to them.

Luck’s the word those with poor hearts use for ka…

So in that sense, I and my fellow horror writers are absorbing and defusing all your fears and anxieties and insecurities and taking them upon ourselves. We’re sitting in the darkness beyond the flickering warmth...

Gli trasmettevano un senso profondo di odio, forse perché erano così alieni da pregiudicare in lui qualsiasi percezione reale della loro sostanza.

In the year 2025, the best men don’t run for president, they run for their lives. . . .

A gunslinger knows pride, that invisible bone that keeps the neck stiff.

He was nothing but a conduit, after all, and there isn’t a culvert in the world that remembers the water flowed through it once the rain has stopped.

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,...