Get busy living or get busy dying.

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

Time takes it all, whether you want it to or not.

We never know which lives we influence, or when, or why.

No one ever does live happily ever after, but we leave the children to find that out for themselves.

What we like to think of ourselves and what we really are rarely have much in common....

We fool ourselves so much we could do it for a living.

They're animals, all right. But why are you so goddam sure that makes us human beings?

In the year 2025, the best men don't run for president, they run for their lives. . . .

I wouldn't have missed a single minute of it, Not for the whole world.

Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration, the rest of us just get up and go to work.

The place where you made your stand never mattered. Only that you were there...and still on your feet.

To write is human, to edit is divine.

Quiet people have the loudest minds.

That wasn't any act of God. That was an act of pure human fuckery.

Humor is almost always anger with its make-up on.

FEAR stands for fuck everything and run.

I think part of being a parent is trying to kill your kids.

Murder is like potato chips: you can't stop with just one.

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

This inhuman place makes human monsters.

Why' is a crooked letter and can't be made straight.

He who hesitates is usually fucked!

never's the word God listens for when he needs a laugh.

If God rewards us on earth for good deeds—the Old Testament suggests it’s so, and the Puritans certainly believed it—then maybe Satan rewards us for evil ones.

It don't matter if you believe in God Nick, he believes in you.

I felt lonely and content at the same time. I believe that is a rare kind of happiness.

Words have weight.

I don't have to listen to rumors about a man when I can judge him for myself.

A person can go along quite awhile if they get a good day every once and again.

...he was after all, a novelist...and a novelist was simply a fellow who got paid to tell lies. The bigger the lies, the better the pay.

Some part of me knew from the first that what I wanted was not reality but myth.

You always know the truth, because when you cut yourself or someone else with it, there’s always a bloody show.

The world was full of monsters, and they were all allowed to bite the innocent and the unwary

He who speaks without an attentive ear is mute.

Sometimes dead is better

We each owe a death, there are no exceptions, I know that, but sometimes, oh God, the Green Mile is so long

You're dead, George. You just don't have the sense to lie down.

The family exists for many reasons, but its most basic function may be to draw together after a member dies.

We fall from womb to tomb, from one blackness and toward another, remembering little of the one and knowing nothing of the other ... except through faith.

There was a lot they didn’t tell you about death, she had discovered, and one of the biggies was how long it took the ones you loved most to die in your heart.

We have once again succeeded in destroying what we could not create.

The monster nevers dies.

We each owe a death, there are no exceptions, I know that, but sometimes, oh God, the Green Mile is so long.

The souls of humans have become poor and transparent things.

Death in the horror movies is when the monsters get you.

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!

Twas something else. I had come to hate her, you see. I had come to wish her dead, and that was what held me back.

To his way of thinking, the only thing more natural than death was sex.

He felt gladness roar through his soul.

There came a time when you realized that moving on was pointless. That you took yourself with you wherever you went.

He lay back, put his arm over his eyes, and tried to hold onto the anger, because the anger made him feel brave. A brave man could think. A coward couldn't.

It's a hard life if you don't weaken.

Remember, Hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies.

Free at last, he thought. Great God Almighty, I'm free at last. Then: I believe this is redemption. And it's good, isn't it? Quite good, indeed.

I remember thinking that the fading of hopes and ambitions was mostly painless. That was good, but it was also rather horrible.

I hope to see my friend and shake his hand. I hope the Pacific is as blue as it has been in my dreams. I hope.

...following my father's dictum: expect nothing but never lose hope.

If you don’t control your temper, your temper will control you.

Talent is a wonderful thing, but it won't carry a quitter.

It's how we see the world that keeps the darkness beyond at bay. Keeps it from pouring through and devouring us. I think all of us might know that, way down deep.

Strong delusions travel like cold germs on a sneeze.

Everybody trusts a guy in a raincoat. I don't know why. It's just one of those mystery facts.

As with all other aspects of the narrative art, you will improve with practice, but practice will never make you perfect. Why should it? What fun would that be?

I can't understand why people use religion to hurt each other when there's already so much pain in the world.

Every man or woman who loves Him, they hate Him too, because He's a hard God, a jealous God.

Oh no, praying is great, without it the thumbscrews and the Iron Maiden probably never would have been invented.

The woman who preaches has poison religion. Let the respectable ones go

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

Fiction is the truth inside the lie.

The road to hell is paved with adverbs.

The scariest moment is always just before you start.

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

you can, you should, and if you’re brave enough to start, you will.

A short story is a different thing altogether – a short story is like a quick kiss in the dark from a stranger.

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

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.

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

Write with the door closed, rewrite with the door open.

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

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

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.

It is the tale, not he who tells it.

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.

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

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.

The more you read, the less apt you are to make a fool of yourself with your pen or word processor.

you must not come lightly to the blank page.

What is writing? Writing is telepathy.

Outlines are the last resource of bad fiction writers who wish to God they were writing masters' theses.

Symbolism exists to adorn and enrich, not to create an artificial sense of profundity.

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

Story is honorable and trustworthy; plot is shifty, and best kept under house arrest.

He felt as he always did when he finished a book — queerly empty, let down, aware that for each little success he had paid a toll of absurdity.

When you sit down to write, write. Don't do anything else except go to the bathroom, and only do that if it absolutely cannot be put off.

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.

No, it’s not a very good story - its author was too busy listening to other voices to listen as closely as he should have to the one coming from inside.

The work, the pride in your work, the worth of the work itself...all those things faded away to the magic-lantern shades they really were when the pain got bad enough.

Sometimes stories cry out to be told in such loud voices that you write them just to shut them up.

The rest of it - and perhaps the best of it - is a permission slip: you can, you should, and if you're brave enough to start, you will.

Only God gets it right the first time and only a slob says, "Oh well, let it go, that's what copyeditors are for.

I've met talespinners before, Jake, and they're all cut more or less from the same cloth. They tell tales because they're afraid of life.

Reading takes time, and the glass teat takes too much of it.

It's about getting up, getting well, and getting over. Getting happy, okay? Getting happy.

But if you needed to HAVE AN IDEA, boredom could be to a roadblocked novel what chemotherapy was to a cancer patient.

... when editors were flattered, they would sometimes give in on some of their mad ideas.

The idea that creative endeavor and mind-altering substances are entwined is one of the great pop-intellectual myths of our time.

Writers are often the worst judges of what they have written.

Shall there be truth between us, as two men? Not as friends, but as enemies and equals?

Your first impulse is to share good news, your second is to club someone with it.

She couldn't be on his wavelength all the time. That's all. When you could recognize that and deal with it, you were on your way to an adult relationship.

Eighty percent of success is just showing up.

Your hair is winter fire,January embers.My heart burns there, too.

Time's the thief of memory

I loved you then and I love you now and I have loved you every second in between.

Time and tide wait for no man.

Time heals all wounds.

In the end, the wind takes everything, doesn't it? And why not? Why other? If the sweetness of our lives did not depart, there would be no sweetness at all.

He had never been a social man. He had shunned causes with contempt and disgust. They were for pig-simple suckers and people with too much time and money on their hands

Read, read, read. Write, write, write.

I am wonderful, I deserve to be wonderful, and I contain multitudes.

Imitation preceded creation.

The scariest moment is always just before you start.After that, things can only get better.