The advantage of horror books is to take the reader and cut him out of the pack and work on him one on one. It has its advantages because the people that are there in the movie theater really are a mob. If you get one guy alone you can do a more efficient job of scaring him.

You could start at a path leading nowhere more fantastic than from your own front steps to the sidewalk, and from there you could go… well, anywhere at all.

He who speaks without an attentive ear is mute.

Discipline and constant work are the whetstones upon which the dull knife of talent is honed until it becomes sharp enough, hopefully, to cut through even the toughest meat and gristle.

I think reality is thin, you know, thin as lake ice after a thaw, and we fill our lives with noise and light and motion to hide that thinness from ourselves.

I have two amazing things in my life: I'm pain-free and I'm debt-free.

He realized now that a lot of the problem had been his own mind, which was usually moving at a speed ten or twenty times that of his classmates. They had thought him strange, weird, or even suicidal, depending on the escapade in question, but maybe it had been a simple case of mental overdrive-if anything about being in constant mental overdrive was simple. Anyway, it was the sort of thing you got under control after a while-you got it under control or you found outlets for it.