And people who don’t dream, who don’t have any kind of imaginative life, they must… they must go nuts. I can’t imagine that.

Last reason for reading horror: it’s a rehearsal for death. It’s a way to get ready. People say there’s nothing sure but death and taxes. But that’s not really true. There’s really only death, you...

Description begins in the writer’s imagination, but should finish in the reader’s.

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.

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.

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?

He had never been a social man. He had shunned causes with contempt and disgust. They were for pig-simple suckers and people with too much time and money on their hands

I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was 12 – Jesus, did you?

I think houses live their own lives along a time-stream that’s different from the ones upon which their owners float, one that’s slower. In a house, especially an old one, the past is closer.

Never will you talk to me like that again.

Oh Christ, he understood more than he wanted to right now. Give me a chance, Louis thought, and I’llunderstand myself right into the nearest mental asylum.

the man in black travels with your soul in his pocket.

Being good is commendable, but only when it is combined with doing good is it useful

Murder is like potato chips: you can’t stop with just one.

Lying in the bed that had once held two, Lisey thought alone never felt more lonely than when you woke up and discovered you still had the house to yourself. That you and the mice...

When teenagers aren’t turning like weathervanes in a high wind, they’re as stiff as Puritans.

Just the act of cooking made her feel better, because cooking was life.

There’s always someone who knows something.

How does it happen that a writer who’s not even very good – and I can say that, I’ve read four or five of his books – gets to be in charge of the world’s...

When you write, you want to get rid of the world, do you not? Of coarse you do. When you’re writing, you’re creating your own worlds.

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!

The glory of a good tale is that it is limitless and fluid; a good tale belongs to each reader in its own particular way.

It’s best to have your tools with you. If you don’t, you’re apt to find something you didn’t expect and get discouraged.