Daily Digest

“Books are the perfect entertainment: no commercials, no batteries, hours of enjoyment for each dollar spent. What I wonder is why everybody doesn't carry a book around for those inevitable dead spots in life.”

“Books are a uniquely portable magic.”

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

“Good books don't give up all their secrets at once.”

“Get busy living or get busy dying.”

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

“The scariest moment is always just before you start.”

“The road to hell is paved with adverbs.”

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

“Fiction is the truth inside the lie.”

“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.”

“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 more than living size when they're brought out. But it's more than that, isn't it? The most important things lie too close to wherever your secret heart is buried, like landmarks to a treasure your enemies would love to steal away. And you may make revelations that cost you dearly only to have people look at you in a funny way, not understanding what you've said at all, or why you thought it was so important that you almost cried while you were saying it. That's the worst, I think. When the secret stays locked within not for want of a teller but for want of an understanding ear.”

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

“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.”

“Calling it a simple schoolgirl crush was like saying a Rolls-Royce was a vehicle with four wheels, something like a hay-wagon. She did not giggle wildly and blush when she saw him, nor did she chalk his name on trees or write it on the walls of the Kissing Bridge. She simply lived with his face in her heart all the time, a kind of sweet, hurtful ache. She would have died for him..”

“Books are the perfect entertainment: no commercials, no batteries,hours of enjoyment for each dollar spent.”

“If you liked being a teenager, there's something really wrong with you.”

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

“This inhuman place makes human monsters.”

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

“If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot. There's no way around these two things that I'm aware of, no shortcut.”

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

“Both Rowling and Meyer, they’re speaking directly to young people. … The real difference is that Jo Rowling is a terrific writer and Stephenie Meyer can’t write worth a darn. She’s not very good.”

“I am, when you stop to think of it, a member of a fairly select group: the final handful of American novelists who learned to read and write before they learned to eat a daily helping of video bullshit.”

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

“Time heals all wounds.”

“I guess when you turn off the main road, you have to be prepared to see some funny houses.”

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

“She was satisfied with the answer God had given Moses from the burning bush when Moses had seen fit to question. Who are you? Mose asks, and God comes back from that bush just as pert as you like: I Am, Who I AM. In other words, Mose, stop beatin around this here bush and get your old ass in gear.”

“If you don't have the time to read, you don't have the time or the tools to write.”

“As it happened, all three of us turned out to be real writers--a coincidence almost too large to be termed mere coincidence in a society where literally tens of thousands (maybe hundreds of thousands) of college students aspire to the writer's trade and where bare hundreds actually break through.”

“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”

“I love crime, I love mysteries, and I love ghosts.”

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

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

“The horror had been articulated; it was out; its face had been drawn and could be regarded. Now, even if it could not be changed, it could at least be wept over.”

“The monster nevers dies.”

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

“Each life makes its own immitation of immortality.”

“The most important things are the hardest things to say. They are the things you get ashamed of because words diminish your feelings - words shrink things that seem timeless when they are in your head to no more than living size when they are brought out.”

“Strong delusions travel like cold germs on a sneeze.”

“I never saw any of my dad's stories. My mother said he had piles and piles of manuscripts.”

“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.”

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

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

“What about reality, you ask? Well, as far as I'm concerned, reality can go take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut. I've never held much of a brief for reality, at least in my written work. All too often it is to the imagination what ash stakes are to vampires.”

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

“I watched Titanic when I got back home from the hospital, and cried. I knew that my IQ had been damaged.”