Quote collection
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"The important question has nothing to do with whether the talk in your story is sacred or profane; the only question is how it rings on the page and in your ear. If you expect it to ring true, then you must talk yourself. Even more important, you must shut up and listen to others talk."
"The good thing about being old, is you don’t have to worry about dying young."
"He was a clot looking for a place to happen, a splinter of bone hunting a soft organ to puncture, a lonely lunatic cell looking for a mate - they would set up housekeeping and raise themselves a cozy little malignant tumor."
"He's a very nice man and all that, easy to get along with, fun, he never makes me cry. But is that love? I mean, is that all there is to it? Even when you learned to ride your two-wheeler, you had to fall off a few times and scrape both knees. Call it a rite of passage. And that was just a little thing."
"Bad chances were better than no chances."
"People can be stunningly unobservant."
"The woman had looked into the abyss and then walked out across it."
"The act of writing itself is done in secret, like masturbation."
"In the years since, I've discovered there's a lot to be said for boredom."
"He sat upon his throne, which is made of skulls."
"If you were seeing a lot of horseshit, there had to be a pony in the vicinity."
"And then the world exploded."
"A person can't change all at once."
"Even the company of the mad was better than the company of the dead."
"Panic is highly contagious, especially in situations when nothing is known and everything is in flux."
"Any game looks straight if everyone is being cheated at once."
"It wasn't just love that held people together. There was secrets, and the price you paid to keep them."
"As infants, our first victory comes in grasping some bit of the world, usually our mother's fingers. Later we discover that the world, and the things of the world, are grasping us, and have been all along."
"When I was a kid I believed everything I was told, everything I read, and every dispatch sent out by my own overheated imagination. This made for more than a few sleepless nights, but it also filled the world I lived in with colors and textures I would not have traded for a lifetime of restful nights."
"If there's one American belief I hold above all others, it's that those who would set themselves up in judgment on matters of what is "right" and what is "best" should be given no rest; that they should have to defend their behavior most stringently. ... As a nation, we've been through too many fights to preserve our rights of free thought to let them go just because some prude with a highlighter doesn't approve of them"