To the devil with false modesty.

Don't let the door hitcha where the good Lord splitcha.

Seven, Richie thought. That's the magic number. There has to be seven of us. That's the way it's supposed to be.

Swear to me swear to me that if it isn't dead you'll all come back.

Good description is a learned skill, one of the prime reasons why you cannot succeed unless you read a lot and write a lot. It’s not just a question of how-to, you see; it’s also a question of how much to. Reading will help you answer how much, and only reams of writing will help you with the how. You can learn only by doing.

And all that weirdness isn't just going on outside. It's in you too, right now, growing in the dark like magic mushrooms. Call it the Thing in the Cellar. Call it the Blow Lunch Factor. Call it the Loony Tunes File. I think of it as my private dinosaur, huge, slimy, and mindless, stumbling around in the stinking swamp of my subconscious, never finding a tar pit big enough to hold it.

Whenever anything important happens in America, they have to gold-plate it, like baby shoes. That way you can forget it.