I get a fine warm feeling when I'm doing well, but that pleasure is pretty much negated by the pain of getting started each day. Let's face it, writing is hell.

Most books, like their authors, are born to die; of only a few books can it be said that death has no dominion over them; they live, and their influence lives forever.

A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading.

It's fine therapy for people who are perpetually scared of nameless threats as I am most of the time — for jittery people.

Mysteriously and in ways that are totally remote from natural experience, the gray drizzle of horror induced by depression takes on the quality of physical pain.

The writer's duty is to keep on writing.

Reading - the best state yet to keep absolute loneliness at bay.

The pain is unrelenting; one does not abandon, even briefly, one's bed of nails, but is attached to it wherever one goes.

It is hopelessness even more than pain that crushes the soul.

The pain of severe depression is quite unimaginable to those who have not suffered it.

A great book should leave you with many experiences.

Actually, I am a failed anorexic. I have anorexic thinking, but I can't seem to muster the behavoir

I should not mistake her calm probing for the absence of anger.

On the road, it's constant sensory overload, and it's easy to lose track of days and time and to get caught up in the constant giving of yourself.

Administrators are like pigs; don't wrestle with a pig because you both get dirty and the pig likes it.

A husband may forget where he went on his honeymoon, but he never forgets why.

I think any role you need to play not so much transforms but I like to think of it as understanding the psychology of another character.

We got victims out there that are getting shot four and five times, point blank range. That's not self-defense. You're not going to tell me that's self-defense.

Stay the course. When thwarted try again; harder; smarter. Persevere relentlessly.

I did Our Daily Bread for King and that made me popular in the Soviet Union; King was amused by that.

Motherhood: 24/7 on the frontlines of humanity. Are you man enough to try it?