At nineteen, it seems to me, one has a right to be arrogant; time has usually not begun its stealthy and rotten subtractions. It takes away your hair and your jump-shot, according to a popular country song, but in truth it takes away a lot more than that.

What Jack didn't understand was that no matter where he went, the same asshole got off the plane.

I don't want to speak too disparagingly of my generation (actually I do, we had a chance to change the world and opted for the Home Shopping Network instead), but there was a view among the student writers I knew at that time that good writing came spontaneously, in an uprush of feeling that had to be caught at once; when you were building that all-important stairway to heaven, you couldn't just stand around with your hammer in your hand.

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.

No one ever really pays for betrayal in silver....The price of any betrayal always comes due in flesh.

What we like to think of ourselves and what we really are rarely have much in common.

Alone. Yes, that's the key word, the most awful word in the English tongue. Murder doesn't hold a candle to it and hell is only a poor synonym.