The town kept its secrets, and the Marsten House brooded over it like a ruined king.
The three true ages of man are youth, middle age, and how the fuck did I get old so soon?
The most important things are the hardest to say. They are the things you get ashamed of, because words diminish them -- words shrink things that seemed limitless when they were in your head to no mor...
The most important things are the hardest things to say. They are things you get ashamed of, because words make them smaller. When they were in your head they were limitless; but when they come out th...
The more you read, the less apt you are to make a fool of yourself with your pen or word processor.
Sometimes she'd go a whole day without thinking of him or missing him. Why not? She had quite a full life, and really, he'd often been hard to deal with and hard to live with. A project, the Yankee ol...
Some of this book—perhaps too much—has been about how I learned to do it. Much of it has been about how you can do it better. The rest of it—and perhaps the best of it—is a permission slip: you can, y...
Resistance to change is proportional to how much the future might be altered by any given act.
Reading in bed can be heaven, assuming you can get just the right amount of light on the page and aren't prone to spilling your coffee or cognac on the sheets.
People say that where there’s life, there’s hope, and I have no quarrel with that, but I also believe the reverse.There is hope, therefore I live.
My father, she said, pronouncing it fadder, and Beverly saw that her dress had also changed. It had become a scabrous, peeling black. The cameo was a skull, its jaw hung in a diseased gape. His name...
McVries seemed not to have heard. These things, they don't even bear the weight of conversation, he said, J.D. Salinger...John Knowles...even James Kirkwood and that guy Don Bredes...they've destroyed...
Life is like Friday on a soap opera. It gives you the illusion that everything is going to wrap up, and then the same old shit starts up on Monday.
Just remember that Dumbo didn't need the feather; the magic was in him.
It's strange how pain marks our faces, and makes us look like family.
It's offense you maybe can't live with because it opens up a crack inside your thinking, and if you look down into it you see there are evil things down there, and they have little yellow eyes that do...
It's hard enough for a person to keep their own socks pulled up, let alone someone else's.
It's alright to feel fear, but sometimes a very bad idea to show it.
If you expect to succeed as a writer, rudeness should be the second-to-least of your concerns. The least of all should be polite society and what it expects. If you intend to write as truthfully as yo...
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.