We fool ourselves so much we could do it for a living.

Making people believe the unbelievable is no trick; it's work... Belief and reader absorption come in the details: An overturned tricycle in the gutter of an abandoned neighborhood can stand for everything.

Roland had taught him that self-deception was nothing but pride in disguise, an indulgence to be denied.

And she sees that the moonlight is losing its orange glow. It has become buttery, and will soon turn to silver.

Only library books speak with such wordless eloquence of the power good stories hold over us.

There is a relationship between humor and fear. Think of all the gags you ever heard that have to do with dismemberment, or something that's horrible in one way or another, even if it's just horrible in the sense that somebody's being embarrassed. What do kids laugh at? Kids laugh if your fly's down. That's hilarious. But for the kid whose fly is down, it's a horrible situation.

I have always felt a little bit uncomfortable with question [why I'm write these stories]. It's not a question that you would ask a guy that writes detective stories or the guy that writes mystery stories, or westerns, or whatever. But it is asked of the writer of horror stories because it seems that there is something nasty about our love for horror stories, or boogies, ghosts and goblins, demons and devils.