May be she’ll learn something about what death really is, which is where the pain stops and the good memories begin. Not the end of life but the end of pain.

She had never dreamed there could be so much pain in a life when there was nothing physically wrong. She hurt all the time.

Upon being asked by a fan how to become a writer, Stephen King replied, "Write.

Readers have a loyalty that cannot be matched anywhere else in the creative arts, which explains why so many writers who have run out of gas can keep coasting anyway, propelled on to the bestseller lists by the magic words AUTHOR OF on the covers of their books.

This is a short book because most books about writing are filled with bullshit.

She is a cat with a burning tail, an ant under a microscope, a fly about to lose its wings to the curious plucking fingers of a third-grader on a rainy day, a game for bored children with no bodies and the whole universe at their feet.

It's a writer's job to carve with language, to hew close to the bone.