A man who can't bear to share his habits is a man who needs to quit them.

If there is love, smallpox scars are as pretty as dimples. - Japanese Proverb

As a teenager, I read a lot of H.P. Lovecraft, so I wrote like H.P. Lovecraft. And in my 20s, I read a lot of Ross Macdonald and Raymond Chandler, so I wrote like those guys. But, little by little, you develop your own style.

Terrible thing to live in fear. Brooks Hatlen knew it. Knew it all too well. All I want is to be back where things make sense. Where I won't have to be afraid all the time.

I'd like to learn French well enough to write in that language.

A child blind from birth doesn't even know he's blind until someone tells him. Even then he has only the most academic idea of what blindness is; only the formerly sighted have a real grip on the thing. Ben Hanscom had no sense of being lonely because he had never been anything but. If the condition had been new, or more localized, he might have understood, but loneliness both encompassed his life and overreached it.

You’d be surprised what a person can live with,” Dan said.