Some of this book—perhaps too much—has been about how I learned to do it. Much of it has been about how you can do it better. The rest of it—and perhaps the best of it—is...

There’s an old rule of theater that goes, ‘If there’s a gun on the mantel in Act I, it must go off in Act III.’ The reverse is also true.

FEAR stands for face everything and recover – Old AA saying

At some point in this course, perhaps even tonight, you will read something difficult, something you only partially understand, and your verdict will be this is stupid. Will I argue when you advance that opinion...

Lend me your wings, bird. I’ll spread them and fly on the thermals.

We’ll just have to get along. That’s what people do, you know? They just get along. And try to help each other.

She knew with suddeness and ease that this moment would be with her always, within hand’s reach of memory.She doubted if they all sensed it – they had seen the world – but even George...

I had been hobbled, perhaps even crippled by a pervasive internet society I had come to depend on and take for granted… hit enter and let Google, that twenty-first century Big Brother, take care of...

E quasi per sbaglio Eddie scoprì una delle grandi verità della sua infanzia: i veri mostri sono gli adulti.

The person healed has an obligation to then ask why— to meditate on God’s will, and the extraordinary lengths to which God has gone to realize His will.

The trap had a ghastly perfection

Beating heroin is child’s play compared to beating your childhood.

His story is simple, because simple is always best.

The prosaic fact of the universe’s existence alone defeats both the pragmatist and the romantic.

Readers have a loyalty that cannot be matched anywhere else in the creative arts, which explains why so many writers who have run out of gas can keep coasting anyway, propelled on to the bestseller...

High school isn’t a very important place. When you’re going you think it’s a big deal, but when it’s over nobody really thinks it was great unless they’re beered up.

Now the two of them rode silently toward town, both lost in their own thoughts. Their way took them past the Delgado house. Roland looked up and saw Susan sitting in her window, a bright...

The object of fiction isn’t grammatical correctness but to make the reader welcome and then tell a story…. Writing is seduction. Good talk is part of seduction.

There’s no tonic like an old friend.

If it’s ka it’ll come like a wind, and your plans will stand before it no more than a barn before a cyclone

Things conceived by minds and made by hands can never be quite the same, even if they try their best to be identical, because they’re never the same from day to day or even moment...

I don’t believe in any actual thinking God that marks the fall of every bird in Australia or every bug in India, a God that records all of our sins in a big golden book...

In many cases when a reader puts a story aside because it ‘got boring,’ the boredom arose because the writer grew enchanted with his powers of description and lost sight of his priority, which is...

One of the really bad things you can do to your writing is to dress up the vocabulary, looking for long words because you’re maybe a little bit ashamed of your short ones. This is...

Talent is a wonderful thing, but it won’t carry a quitter.

It starts with this: put your desk in the corner, and every time you sit down there to write, remind yourself why it isn’t in the middle of the room. Life isn’t a support system...

In North Carolina, I stopped to gas up at a Humble Oil station, then walked around the corner to use the toilet. There were two doors and three signs. MEN was neatly stenciled over one...

…there were those who might have suggested that reality is a highly untrustworthy concept, something perhaps no more solid than a piece of canvas stretched over an interlacing of cables like the strands of a...

She looks like the type that might freak out. It’s something in the eyes, Frannie. It says if you shoot my sacred cows, I’ll shoot yours.

Grief is like a drunken house guest, always coming back for one more goodbye hug.

Invitation to Dance-It’s a Dance. And sometimes they turn the lights off in this ballroom.But we’ll dance anyway, you and I. Even in the Dark. Especially in the Dark.May I have the pleasure?

Die steinerne Verstocktheit barst, darunter kam die Fratze eines bis zum Irrsinn wütenden Kindes zum Vorschein

You can lead a whore to culture, but you can’t make her think.

But grownups were always in a turmoil, every possible action muddied over by thoughts of the consequences, by self-doubt, by selfimage, by feelings of love and responsibility. Every possible choice seemed to have drawbacks, and...

A man’s life was five dogs long, Cortland believed. The first was the one that taught you. The second was the one you taught. The third and fourth were the ones you worked. The last...

But he went on. I expect you to do the same.

La verdad no es realmente más extraña que la ficción, digan lo que digan. La mayoria de la veces uno sabe exactamente como van a salir las cosas.-Paul

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?

Danny strolled to the town common, sat on one of the benches in Teenytown and took one of the bottles out of the bag, looking down on it like Hamlet with Yorick’s skull

In retrospect, this seems to summarize all the insanity of that time. Guy is standing on top of a burning building. Helicopter arrives, hovers, drops a rope ladder. Climb up! the man leaning out of...

You know what talent is? The curse of expectation. As a kid you have to deal with that, beat it somehow. If you can write, you think God put you on earth to blow Shakespeare...

All right. Here’s the deal, bigshot: suck my cock. Do that and I’ll let you go. Straight trade.”He unzipped his fly and pulled down the elastic front of his shorts. Something that looked like a...

Time takes it all, whether you want it to or not.

The greatest mystery the universe offers is not life but Size.

I am, he thought dimly, watching a vampire take a piss.

I like to get ten pages a day, which amounts to 2,000 words. That’s 180,000 words over a three-month span, a goodish length for a book — something in which the reader can get happily...

For me, that emotional payoff is what it’s all about. I want you to laugh or cry when you read a story…or do both at the same time. I want your heart, in other words....

Friendships founded on laughter are always fortuitous.

It’s a hard life if you don’t weaken.

The shuddering would not stop. The pain was like the end of the world. He thought: There comes a point when the very discussion of pain becomes redundant. No one knows there is pain the...