The best calumnies are spiced with truth.

Robert was never the same after he put on that crown. Some men are like swords, made for fighting. Hang them up and they go to rust.

I was just a kid selling monster stories to the kids in the projects, complete with a dramatic reading, making the werewolf sounds. My career was aborted early on because one of my main customers started to have nightmares and his mother came to my mother and my mother shut down my whole business.

Power resides only where men believe it resides. [...] A shadow on the wall, yet shadows can kill. And ofttimes a very small man can cast a very large shadow.

Children are a battle of a different sort. ... A battle without banners or warhorns but no less fierce.

Writing is like sausage making in my view; you'll all be happier in the end if you just eat the final product without knowing what's gone into it.

I had an encyclopedia with a list of flags in the back, so I would look at all these flags of China and Liberia and England and Denmark and whatever, and I learned all the different flags and I tried to imagine what it would be like to be voyaging on some of these ships.