The sandwich he made was bologna and cheese, his favorite. All the sandwiches he made were his favorites; that was one of the advantages of being single.

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.

By writing a horror novel where this inexplicable disorder takes over in our ordered lives, you make order look better by comparison. But below that, there's a part of us that responds to the Who bashing their instruments to pieces on the stage. There's a very primitive part that says, "Do it some more."

Later, going home, I realized they didn't look alike at all; what made them seem to was the aftermath of stress and the lingering of sorrow. It's strange how pain marks our faces, and makes us look like family.

Friends come in and out of our lives, like busboys in a restaurant.

Only two things happen to writers when they die: Either their work survives, or it becomes forgotten.

and now, all these years later, it seem to him that the most horrible fact of human existence was that broken hearts mended