If there is love, smallpox scars are as pretty as dimples. I'll love your face no matter what it looks like. Because it's yours.

At nineteen, it seems to me, one has a right to be arrogant; time has usually not begun its stealthy and rotten subtractions. It takes away your hair and your jump-shot, according to a popular country song, but in truth it takes away a lot more than that.

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

There's a lot of things people think they can't do and then discover they can when they find themselves tight-wired.

I believe the first draft of a book — even a long one — should take no more than three months…Any longer and — for me, at least — the story begins to take on an odd foreign feel, like a dispatch from the Romanian Department of Public Affairs, or something broadcast on high-band shortwave duiring a period of severe sunspot activity.

Terrible thing to live in fear. Brooks Hatlen knew it. Knew it all too well. All I want is to be back where things make sense. Where I won't have to be afraid all the time.

People seem to think there's a magic formula to writing, i just write 1 word at a time.