He had never been a social man. He had shunned causes with contempt and disgust. They were for pig-simple suckers and people with too much time and money on their hands.

What can be done when you’re eleven can often never be done again.

He would write it for the reason he felt that all great literature, fiction and nonfiction, was written: truth comes out, in the end it always comes out. He would write it because he felt he had to.

I recognize terror as the finest emotion and so I will try to terrorize the reader. But if I find that I cannot terrify, I will try to horrify, and if I find that I cannot horrify, I'll go for the gross-out. I'm not proud.

When you write a book, you spend day after day scanning and identifying the trees. When you’re done, you have to step back and look at the forest.

What we like to think of ourselves and what we really are rarely have much in common.

Gordie: Do you think I'm weird? Chris: Definitely. Gordie: No man, seriously. Am I weird? Chris: Yeah, but so what? Everybody's weird