Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
By and large... the good's an illusion, little fables folks tell themselves so they can get through their days without screaming too much.
if you tell yourself the great lie of bad art-that you are in charge-your chance at the truth will be lost. The truth isn't always pretty.
See the BEAR of fearsome size! All the WORLD'S within his eyes. TIME grows thin, the past is a riddle; The TOWER awaits you in the middle.
When the dawn was still long hours away, bad thoughts took on flesh and began to walk. In the middle of the night thoughts became zombies.
Now I think all of us were born with a hole in our hearts, and we go around looking for the person who can fill it. You... you fill me up.
My mother was a reader, and she read to us. She read us Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde when I was six and my brother was eight; I never forgot it.
If you have given up your heart ... you have already lost. A heartless creature is a loveless creature, and a loveless creature is a beast.
The quiet, singing voice of the rose. The song that promised all might be well, all might be well, that all manner of things might be well.
Writing is like sex. The more you think about it, the harder it is to do. It's better not to think about it so much and just let it happen.
But now the joy is gone and the sadness is back, the sadness feels like something deserved, the price of some not-quite-forgotten betrayal.
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.
Most people are optimists, although they may claim they are not. People who call themselves realists are often the biggest optimists of all.
Don't let the sun go down without saying thank you to someone, and without admitting to yourself that absolutely no one gets this far alone.
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.
Tell him he's wrong. Tell him that even if he's right about waiting, he's right for the wrong reasons, and that makes him all the way wrong.
And will I tell you that these three lived happily ever after? I will not, for no one ever does. But there was happiness. And they did live.
Constant reading will pull you into a place - a mind-set, if you like the phrase - where you can write eagerly and without self-consciousness.
When creative people do their best work, they're hardly ever in charge, they're just sort of rolling along with their eyes shut yelling wheee.
Come on back and we’ll see if you remember the simplest thing of all – how it is to be children, secure in belief and thus afraid of the dark.
The idea for a novel is like a little tiny fire in a dark night. And, one by one, the characters come and stand around it and warm their hands.
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.
Flip-flop, hippety-hop, offa your rocker and over the top, life's a fiction and the world's a lie, so put on some Creedence and let's get high.
There's a saying - "Write what you know." It's bad advice if you take it as an unbreakable rule, but good advice if you use it as a foundation.
The worst thing you can try to do is to steer the story once it gets going. You just kind of follow along and see where it goes. That's the fun.
I go where the story leads. And, sometimes, it is a little bit outrageous. And I relish that. I sort of want to be as much on the edge as I can.
I hardly ever read mainstream fiction that deals with life as it is. I like an element of fantasy, something that isn`t quite of the real world.
Of course they had more chains on him than Scrooge saw on Marley's ghost, but he could have kicked up dickens if he'd wanted. That's a pun, son.
Writing is like being in a dream state or under self-directed hypnosis. It induces a state of recall that - while not perfect - is pretty spooky.
A kid of your age---any kid---could get hold of matches if she wanted to, burn up the house or whatever. But not many do. Why would they want to?
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.
You cannot friend a hawk, they said, unless you are a hawk yourself, alone and only a sojourner in the land, without friends or the need of them.
It might be that the biggest division in the world isn't men and women but folks who like cats and folks who like dogs" - (L.T.'s Theory of Pets)
Money means I can support my family and still do what I love. Not very many people can say that in this world, and not many writers can say that.
When you write a book, you spend day after day scanning and identifying the trees. When you’re done, you have to step back and look at the forest.
My books depend on someone in danger, putting pieces together and figuring things out. They do a lot of thinking, and that gets lost in the movie.
All is forgotten in the stone halls of the dead. These are the rooms of ruin where the spiders spin and the great circuits fall quiet, one by one.
I see things, that's all. Write enough stories and every shadow on the floor looks like a footprint; every line in the dirt like a secret message.
Man may have been made in the image of God, but human society was made in the image of His opposite number, and is always trying to get back home.
One of life's great truths is this: when one is about to be struck by a speeding six-hundred pound Coke machine, one need worry about little else.
Anything with the power to make you laugh over thirty years later isn’t a waste of time. I think something like that is very close to immortality.
Try any goddam thing you like, no matter how boringly normal or outrageous. If it works, fine. If it doesn't, toss it. Toss it even if you love it.
Dead fields under a November sky, scattered rose petals brown and turning up at the edges, empty pools scummed with algae, rot, decomposition, dust.
Do you believe in an afterlife?" the gunslinger asked him as Brown dropped three ears of hot corn onto his plate. Brown nodded. "I think this is it.
I think it is beyond doubt that H. P. Lovecraft has yet to be surpassed as the twentieth century's greatest practitioner of the classic horror tale.
And I wonder if there is really any point to what I'm doing, or what I'm supposed to make of a world where a man can get rich playing "let's pretend
And if you are honest about the words coming out of your characters' mouths, you'll find that you've let yourself in for a fair amount of criticism.
Schizoid behavior is a pretty common thing in children. It's accepted, because all we adults have this unspoken agreement that children are lunatics.
Has it ever occurred to you that parents are nothing but overgrown kids until their children drag them into adulthood? Usually kicking and screaming?
Kill you all!" The clown was laughing and screaming. "Try to stop me and I'll kill you all! Drive you crazy and then kill you all! You can't stop me!
Semi-facetiously, when people ask me why I write these kinds of stories, I simply say that I was warped as a child. And, there is some truth to that.