Every rejection is incremental payment on your dues that in some way will be translated back into your work.

There's nothing like rejection to make you do an inventory of yourself.

I used to save all my rejection slips because I told myself, one day I'm going to autograph these and auction them. And then I lost the box.

If there is any human tragedy, there is only one, and it occurs when we forget who we are and remain silent while a stranger takes up residence inside our skin.

The system shaves the dice on the side of those with money and power, and anyone who believes otherwise deserves anything that happens to him.

You do it a day at a time. You write as well as you can, you put it in the mail, you leave it under submission, you never leave it at home.

And like most middle-aged people who hear the clock ticking in their lives, I had come to resent a waste or theft of my time that was greater than any theft of my goods or money.

How do you explain to yourself the casual manner in which you threw your life away?

...and I wonder if there is any way to adequately describe the folly that causes us to undo all the great gifts of both Earth and Heaven.

When you find the right people, you never let go. The people who count are the ones who are your friends in lean times. You have all the friends you want when things are going well.

That's one of the great advantages of age. You can say, I don't want to, I don't care, you can throw temper tantrums, and nobody minds.

We need days of failure because they help humble us, and through them we can see how God's grace is poured out on the humble.

This, explained the angel, is hell. The people do not love each other. They only want to feed themselves.

She is a loner, too bright for the slutty girls and too savage for the bright girls, haunting the edges and corners of the school like a sullen disillusioned ghost

I got to actually tattoo one of the members of The Misfits. The very first tattoo I ever did was this Misfits skull.

In solitude, where we are least alone.

Books have been to me what gold is to the miser, what new fields are to the explorer.

I'm a bit of a control freak, so I always appreciate being inside the nuts and bolts of the music - I don't like newer programs that paper over your cracks.

Ultimately, your theme will find you. You don't have to go looking for it.

I wouldn’t kill your pony. I’d like to believe it, anyway. I’d like to believe I wouldn’t drag you out in to the woods and leave you there, either. So far, it hasn’t come up.

We do not progress from error to truth, but from truth to truth