Twas something else. I had come to hate her, you see. I had come to wish her dead, and that was what held me back.

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

If you write (or paint or dance or sculpt or sing, I suppose), someone will try to make you feel lousy about it, that's all.

We never know which lives we influence, or when, or why. Not until the future eats the present, anyway. We know when it's too late.

You can approach the act of writing with nervousness, excitement, hopefulness, or despair ... Come to it any way but lightly.

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.

Everybody wants to psychoanalyze horror. They don't want to psychoanalyze a book like Gay Talese's "Sex with Your Neighbor" [sic] or something like that. It's pretty much accepted that Americans should be interested in who they're diddling and how they're doing it.