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.

Outside, daylight was bleeding slowly toward dusk.

Only two things happen to writers when they die: Either their work survives, or it becomes forgotten.

Bloom never pissed me off because there are critics out there, and he's one of them, who take their ignorance about popular culture as a badge of intellectual prowess.

And that almost killed you?" "It wasn't deep but it got infected. Infection means that the bad germs got into it. Infection's the most dangerous thing there is, Tom. Infection was what made the superflu germ kill all the people. And infection is what made people want to make the germ in the first place. An infection of the mind.

If you wrote something for which someone sent you a check, if you cashed the check and it didn't bounce, and if you then paid the light bill with the money, I consider you talented.

The mind can calculate, but the spirit yearns, and the heart knows what the heart knows