Time apparently did nothing but blunt grief’s sharpest edge so that it hacked rather than sliced.
Thought only gives the world an appearance of order to anyone weak enough to be convinced by its show. Colin Wilson The Country of the Blind
This is a short book because most books about writing are filled with bullshit.
Things do happen for a reason, but do we like the reason? Rarely.
The soil of a man's heart is stonier, Louis. A man grows what he can, and he tends it. 'Cause what you buy, is what you own. And what you own... always comes home to you.
The scariest moment is always just before you start.
The road to hell is paved with adverbs.
The memories that went with the house—the sense of unfairness and failure, the patched hole in the kitchen wall—were too raw. Frank felt as though he had been tricked out of his entire life and the be...
The beauty of religious mania is that it has the power to explain everything. Once God (or Satan) is accepted as the first cause of everything which happens in the mortal world, nothing is left to cha...
The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want for nothing. He makes me lie down in the green pastures. He greases up my head with oil. He gives me kung-fu in the face of my enemies. Amen
Speech destroys the function of love, I think-that's a hell of a thing for a writer to say, I guess, but I believe it to be true. If you speak to tell a deer you mean it no harm, it glides away with a...
Sorry is the Kool-Aid of human emotions. It's what you say when you spill a cup of coffee or throw a gutter ball when you're bowling with the girls in the league. True sorrow is as rare as true love.
Sooner or later everything you thought you'd left behind comes around again. For good or ill, it comes around again.
Sooner or later even the fastest runners have to stand and fight.
Sometimes you have to go on when you don't feel like it, and sometimes you're doing good work when it feels like all you're managing is to shovel shit from a sitting position.
Sometimes the things presented to us as choices aren't choices at all.
Sometimes human places, create inhuman monsters.
Sometimes a cigar is just a smoke and a story's just a story
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...
So okay there you are in your room with the shade down and the door shut and the plug pulled out of the base of the telephone. You've blown up your TV and committed yourself to a thousand words a day,...