I am the literary equivalent of a Big Mac and fries.

And in real life endings aren’t always neat, whether they’re happy endings, or whether they’re sad endings.

Life is like a wheel. Sooner or later, it always come around to where you started again.

If I have to spend time in purgatory before going to one place or the other, I guess I’ll be all right as long as there’s a lending library.

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.

Eddie discovered one of his childhood’s great truths. Grownups are the real monsters, he thought.

Fault always lies in the same place: with him weak enough to lay blame.

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 sometimes we lose them there again.

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.

The road to hell is paved with adverbs.

Give me just enough information so that I can lie convincingly.

Speaking personally, you can have my gun, but you’ll take my book when you pry my cold, dead fingers off of the binding.

When you write you tell yourself a story. When you rewrite you take out everything that is NOT the story.

I thought it was great fun to scare people. I also knew it was socially acceptable because there were a lot of horror movies out there.

Life is like a wheel. Sooner or later, it always comes around to where you started again.

Some birds are not meant to be caged, that’s all. Their feathers are too bright, their songs too sweet and wild.

The mind can calculate, but the spirit yearns, and the heart knows what the heart knows.

Perfect paranoia is perfect awareness.

You cannot hope to sweep someone else away by the force of your writing until it has been done to you.

Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule.

I think that we’re all mentally ill. Those of us outside the asylums only hide it a little better – and maybe not all that much better after all.

Fiction is the truth inside the lie.

I guess when you turn off the main road, you have to be prepared to see some funny houses.

Nobody likes a clown at midnight.

Whatever came to mind, whatever came to hand, I would read.

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

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

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

You see something, then it clicks with something else, and it will make a story. But you never know when it’s going to happen.

Life isn’t a support system for art. It’s the other way around.

Sooner or later even the fastest runners have to stand and fight.

Good books don’t give up all their secrets at once.

People think that I must be a very strange person. This is not correct. I have the heart of a small boy. It is in a glass jar on my desk.

You can’t deny laughter; when it comes, it plops down in your favorite chair and stays as long as it wants.

Books and movies are like apples and oranges. They both are fruit, but taste completely different.

Books and movies are like apples and oranges. They both are fruit, but taste completely different..

Books are the perfect entertainment: no commercials, no batteries, hours of enjoyment for each dollar spent. What I wonder is why everybody doesn’t carry a book around for those inevitable dead spots in life.

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

You must not come lightly to the blank page.

A little talent is a good thing to have if you want to be a writer. But the only real requirement is the ability to remember every scar.

If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.

Your job isn’t to find these ideas but to recognize them when they show up.

I tend to scare myself.

I tend to scare myself.

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

Quiet people have the loudest minds.

If you liked being a teenager, there’s something really wrong with you.

Monsters are real, and ghosts are real too. They live inside us, and sometimes, they win.