As it happened, all three of us turned out to be real writers--a coincidence almost too large to be termed mere coincidence in a society where literally tens of thousands (maybe hundreds of thousands) of college students aspire to the writer's trade and where bare hundreds actually break through.

You can see the goldenrod, that most tenacious and pernicious and beauteous of all New England flora, bowing away from the wind like a great and silent congregation.

Why don't we all just go crazy when we know were going to croak? Because the mind's a monkey. You put things in departments and you go ahead. You go on and plan for the future and assume that the future's going to work out okay. Yet we know that sooner or later we're all going to be eating worms, whether it's fifty years or sixty. It might be tomorrow. It might happen today.

May you find your Tower, Roland, and breach it, and may you climb to the top!

When you put on a clown suit and a rubber nose, nobody has any idea what you look like inside.

All you imagined, no matter how wild it might seem, was no more than a disguised version of what you already knew.

Poe was the first writer to write about main characters who were bad guys or who were mad guys, and those are some of my favorite stories.