We need books...because we are all, in the private kingdoms of our hearts, desperate for the company of a wise, true friend.

All readers come to fiction as willing accomplices to your lies. Such is the basic goodwill contract made the moment we pick up a work of fiction.

Misery loves another idiot with a jukebox where his soul should be.

Nothing on Earth is so beautiful as the final haul on Halloween night.

At the end of night, before you close your eyes, be content with what you've done and be proud of who you are.

I have a hard time defending the production of candy, given that it is basically crack for children and makes them dependent in unwholesome ways.

The answer is that we don't choose our freaks, they choose us.

At about the age of ten, during a late summer visit to Sears to buy school clothes, I became aware of the concept of candy by the pound.

The single biggest reason I got my stories taken in various literary magazines - and I want to stress this - is because I refused to give up. Period.

If you want to fight a cult, you've got to form a cult.

To look at the work of your peers, and learn how to explain with kindness and precision, the nature of their mistakes is, in fact, how you learn to diagnose your own work.

I've said it before and I'll say it again, my lord. You are an evil man.

Prayer is a spiritual device that links humankind direct to the Father.

And have your mother put my head on a stake? Do you have any notion what that would do to my handsome good looks?

Be daring and determined. There is nothing to lose in this life.

Christmas was an intentionally intentional decision of the greatest sort ever devised that would result in the greatest cost ever conceived

Everyone has love, but it can only come out when he is convinced of the impossibility and the frustration of trying to love himself.

Wall Street has a few prudent principles; the trouble is that they are always forgotten when they are most needed.

I have been unable to live an uncommitted or suspended life. I have not hesitated to declare my affiliation with an extremely unpopular cause.

Jeezum—humans were like eggshells.

…Jo loved a few persons very dearly and dreaded to have their affection lost or lessened in any way.