the man in black travels with your soul in his pocket.

There is a story in the book Night Shift, called 'The Mangler,' about a laundry machine that takes on a sort of malignant life. I worked in a laundry for about a year and a half after I got out of college. It was the only job I could find to support my wife and our first child. There was a fellow there that had no hands or forearms. He simply had hooks. This is one of the things that they don't tell you about when you become management. You have to wear a tie. It was this fellow's tie that did him in.

When you're six, most of your Bingo balls are still floating around in the draw-tank.

Did it [cocaine] for about eight years. Not a terribly long time to be an addict I guess, but it is longer than World War II.

I didn't go to bars much. One drunken asshole was all I could handle and that was me. I wrote. I don't remember a lot of it.

Your job isn't to find these ideas but to recognize them when they show up.

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