As with all other aspects of the narrative art, you will improve with practice, but practice will never make you perfect. Why should it? What fun would that be?

I never think of stories as made things; I think of them as found things. As if you pull them out of the ground, and you just pick them up. Someone once told me that...

Alone.Yes,that’s the key word, the most awful word in the English tongue. Murder doesn’t hold a candle to it and hell is only a poor synonym.

That’s the curse of the reading class. We can be seduced by a good story even at the most inopportune moments.

When an imaginative person gets into mental trouble, the line between seeming and being has a way of disappearing-

Don’t think I know you,” Harold said, grinning, as they shook. He had a firm grip. Larry’s hand was pumped up and down exactly three times and let go. It reminded Larry of the time...

Start with a blank surface. It doesn’t have to be paper or canvas, but I feel it should be white. We call it white because we need a word, but its true name is nothing....

Close your eyes and click your heals three times…because there’s no place like Dome.

We’ll eat your steam and lap up your blood. But first, we’ll drink your screams

Working with him was sort of like trying to defuse a bomb with somebody standing behind you and every now and then clashing a pair of cymbals together. In a word, upsetting.

The woman had looked into the abyss and then walked out across it.

E’ una bambina che è stata punita per la sua innocente superbia, una bambina che ha commesso l’errore di pensare di essere grande quando era piccola, di contare quando non valeva niente, di essere circondata...

I stood for almost an hour in a line of shuffling, bitter – eyed late mailers (Christmas is such a carefree, low – pressure time – that’s one of the things I love about it),…

A man who lies about beer makes enemies

What you need to remember is that there’s a difference between lecturing about what you know and using it to enrich the story. The latter is good. The former is not.

Hairstyles change, and skirt lengths, and slang, but high school administrations? Never.

Sorry is the Kool-Aid of human emotions. It’s what you say when you spill a cup of coffee or throw a gutter ball when you’re bowling with the girls in the league. True sorrow is...

Listen, I’ve always been a situational writer. My idea of what to do with a plot is to shoot it before it can breed. It’s true that when I start a story, I usually have...

There came a time when you realised that moving on was pointless. That you took yourself with you wherever you went.

That wasn’t any act of God. That was an act of pure human fuckery.

He was in that mostly empty-headed state of grace which is sometimes such fertile soil ; it’s the ground from which our brightest dreams and biggest ideas (both good and spectacularly bad) suddenly burst forth,...

There’s always a choice. That’s God’s way, always will be. Your will is still free. Do as you will. There’s no set of leg-irons on you. But… this is what God wants of you.

Writing is magic, as much the water of life as any other creative art. The water is free. So drink. Drink and be filled up.

As a young man just beginning to publish some short fiction in the t&a magazines, I was fairly optimistic about my chances of getting published; I knew that I had some game, as the basketball...

Strong delusions travel like cold germs on a sneeze.

How to Draw a Picture (XII)Know when you’re finished, and when you are, put your pencil or your paintbrush down. All the rest is only life.

No one can tell what goes on in between the person you were and the person you become. No one can chart that blue and lonely section of hell. There are no maps of the...

Schizoid behavior is a pretty common thing in children. It’s accepted, because all we adults have this unspoken agreement that children are lunatics.

The concept of dreaming is known to the waking mind but to the dreamer there is no waking, no real world, no sanity; there is only the screaming bedlam of sleep.

What I’d show you is much more bizarre than anything we have looked at so far, and I warn you in advance that the first impulse will be to laugh. That’s all right. Laugh if...

At bottom, you see, we are not Homo sapiens as all. Our core is madness. The prime directive is murder. What Darwin was too polite to say, my friends, is that we came to rule...

There’s an idea that hell is other people. My idea is that it might be repetition.

The world has given me a good life since then, I won’t deny it, but sometimes I hate the world, anyway. Dick Cheney, that apologist for water boarding and for too long chief preacher in...

Es la regla Sherlock: cuando eliminas lo imposible, lo que queda, por improbable que sea, es la respuesta.

When one has little faith, one must survive from day to day signs-

Any thoughts of guilt, any feelings of regret, had faded. The desert had baked them out.

Los viajes por el camino del recuerdo nunca son buenos cuando se está deprimido

A man with a good wife is the luckiest of God’s creatures, and one without must be among the most miserable, I think, the only true blessing of their lives that they don’t know how...

Baseball is a good thing. Always was, always will be.

Can I be blunt on this subject? If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.

There were times . . . when it occurred to me that I was repeating my mother’s life. Usually this thought struck me as funny. But if I happened to be tired, or if there...

Well, luck is for fools. It’s all they have to hope for, poor devils.

We never know which lives we influence, or when, or why.

Sometimes when you’re young, you have moments of such happiness, you think you’re living on someplace magical, like Atlantis must have been. Then we grow up and our hearts break into two.

PRECOGNITION, TELEPATHY, BULLSHIT! EAT MY DONG, YOU EXTRASENSORY TURKEY!

you must not come lightly to the blank page.

‎If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot…reading is the creative center of a writer’s life…you cannot hope to sweep someone...

And as I thought about the body of Ray Brower in this light- or lack of it- what I felt was not queasiness or fear that he would suddenly appear before us, a green and...

And sometimes before I went to sleep I’d think: This is how, this is how you pay off bein’ a bitch. And it ain’t no use sayin’ if you haven’t been a bitch you wouldn’t...

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?