Hearts can break. Yes, hearts can break. Sometimes I think it would be better if we died when they did, but we don't.

I do have one slightly crooked wheel upstairs, but everything else is ticking along just four-o, thank you very much.

The most important things are the hardest to say. They are the things you get ashamed of, because words diminish them.

I think the best stories always end up being about the people rather than the event, which is to say character-driven.

It’s hard to let go. Even when what you’re holding onto is full of thorns, it’s hard to let go. Maybe especially then.

Paul LePage has become a terrible embarrassment to the state I live in and love. If he won't govern, he should resign.

If you can't laugh when things go bad--laugh and put on a little carnival--then you're either dead or wishing you were.

I think you're a taker. You've always been one. It's like God left some part of you out when He built you inside of me.

THE THREE is really wonderful. A mix of Michael Crichton and Shirley Jackson, hard to put down and vastly entertaining.

The low bird is not picked tenderly out of the dust by its fellows; rather, it is dispatched quickly and without mercy.

You don't always talk with your mouth. Sometimes what you say with your mouth hardly matters at all. You have to signify

You learn best by reading a lot and writing a lot, and the most valuable lessons of all are the ones you teach yourself.

Talent is cheaper than table salt. What separates the talented individual from the successful one is a lot of hard work.

What happens to the wide-eyed observer when the window between reality and unreality breaks and the glass begins to fly?

The Overlook was still not done with him. Written on the mirror, not in lipstick but in blood, was a single word: REDRUM

She ran out of her marriage the way a woman can run out of a pair of sandals when she decides to let go and really dash.

As a rule, I don't worry about genre. I just want to tell a good story, with characters that interest me and my readers.

I didn't want to even stand next to any high rise building as long as I lived... I didn't even want to go over a bridge.

Whenever anything important happens in America, they have to gold-plate it, like baby shoes. That way you can forget it.

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.

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

Kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your darlings.

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.

Why does everyone think that I am a cruel and insensitive man? I mean, come on, I have kids... on my desk in little jars!

If it's OK to register cars and license drivers, why is it not OK to impose similar legal responsibilities on gun owners?

Clear communication between selves - the surface self and the deep self - is the enemy of self-doubt. It slays confusion.

What I'm saying is that I'm trying to find rational reasons to explain irrational feelings, and that's neveer a good sign.

I don't like the idea that I am going to come back as an ant or a sparrow if I don't get along in the great karma of life.

They walked through the rainy dark like gaunt ghosts, and Garraty didn't like to look at them. They were the walking dead.

I like to end stories where the readers have a little room to run. They can resolve things as they like in their own mind.

Jesus watches from the wall, But his face is cold as stone, And if he loves me As she tells me Why do I feel so all alone?

Every book you pick up has its own lesson or lessons, and quite often the bad books have more to teach than the good ones.

I'm seen as somebody who writes for adults because I'm an older man myself. Some of them find me, and a lot of them don't.

She had never dreamed there could be so much pain in a life when there was nothing physically wrong. She hurt all the time.

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.

and now, all these years later, it seem to him that the most horrible fact of human existence was that broken hearts mended

Anyone who thinks impressions of old movie actors is funny absolutely cannot be trusted. I think it's like a law of nature.

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.

Outside, a gusty October breeze was combing leaves from the trees and sending them across her backyard in colorful skitters.

I didn't go to bars much. One drunken asshole was all I could handle and that was me. I wrote. I don't remember a lot of it.

Do you need someone to make you a paper badge with the word WRITER on it before you can believe you are one? God I hope not.

If you write (or paint or dance or sculpt or sing, I suppose), someone will try to make you feel lousy about it, that's all.

He was a romantic in his own harsh way…yet he was also realist enough to know that some times love actually did conquer all.

Did it [cocaine] for about eight years. Not a terribly long time to be an addict I guess, but it is longer than World War II.

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

A successful novel should interrupt the reader’s life, make him or her miss appointments, skip meals, forget to walk the dog.

She felt like someone who drowns remembering what it was like to still be on the boat, so calm and at ease, so carelessly safe

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.

and so will the world end, I think, a victim of love rather than hate. For love's ever been the more destructive weapon, sure.

When the reader hears strong echoes of his or her own life and beliefs, he or she is apt to become more invested in the story.

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