The shining. It was a good name, a comforting name, because she had always thought of it as a dark thing.

If I have to spend time in purgatory before going to one place or the other, I guess I'll be all right as long as there's a lending library.

One of the really bad things you can do to your writing is to dress up the vocabulary, looking for long words because you're maybe a little bit ashamed of your short ones. This is like dressing up a household pet in evening clothes. The pet is embarrassed and the person who committed this act of premeditated cuteness should be even more embarrassed.

A little talent is a good thing to have if you want to be a writer. But the only real requirement is the ability to remember every scar.

What's been tried once had been tried once before... and before... and before...

Do you know how cruel your God can be, David. How fantastically cruel?...Sometimes he makes us live.

Writing is like a little hole in reality that you can go through and you can get out and you can be someplace else for a while.