We are going to fight. We are going to be hurt. And in the end, we will stand.

And I guess you judge how well you're doing by how well you sleep at night... and what your dreams are like.

A little arrogance (or even a lot) isn't such a bad thing, although your mother undoubtedly told you different. Mine did. "Pride goeth before a fall, Stephen", she said... and then I found out - right around the age that is 19 x 2 - that eventually you fall down, anyway.

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.

When you write you tell yourself a story. When you rewrite you take out everything that is NOT the story.

I know your mother lives in your head - almost everyone's mother does, I guess - but you can't let her have her way on this one

A book is like a pump. It gives nothing unless first you give to it. You prime a pump with your own water, you work the handle with your own strength. You do this because you expect to get back more than you give.