Stephen King

...reading in bed can be heaven, assuming you can get just the right amount of light on the page and aren't prone to spilling your coffee or cognac on the sheets.

Never believe a writer. Listen to them, by all means, but never believe them.

Terror...often arises from a pervasive sense of disestablishment; that things are in the unmaking.

I recognize terror as the finest emotion (used to almost quintessential effect in Robert Wise's film The Haunting, where, as in The Monkey's Paw, we are never allowed to see what is behind the door), and so I will try to terrorize the reader. But if I find I cannot terrify him/her, I will try to horrify; and if I find I cannot horrify, I'll go for the gross-out. I'm not proud.

We may only feel really comfortable with horror as long as we can see the zipper running up the monster's back, when we understand that we are not playing for keepsies.

I've found, though, that in real life coincidence is not the exception but the rule.

...the best horror films, like the best fairy tales, manage to be reactionary, anarchistic, and revolutionary all at the same time.

If we are all insane, then all insanity becomes a matter of degree. If your insanity leads you to carve up women like Jack the Ripper or the Cleveland Torso Murderer, we clap you away in the funny farm (except neither of those two amateur-night surgeons were ever caught, heh-heh-heh); if, on the other hand, your insanity leads you only to talk to yourself when you're under stress or to pick your nose on your morning bus, then you are left alone to go about your business...although it's doubtful that you will ever be invited to the best parties.

We fall from womb to tomb, from one blackness and toward another, remembering little of the one and knowing nothing of the other...except through faith.

Some of this book—perhaps too much—has been about how I learned to do it. Much of it has been about how you can do it better. The rest of it—and perhaps the best of it—is a permission slip: you can, you should, and if you're brave enough to start, you will. Writing is magic, as much the water of life as any other creative art. The water is free. So drink. Drink and be filled up.

…of the langoliers, who obviously did not know, they were lurking everywhere, behind every bush and tree, in every shadow, just over the horizon… The langoliers had come for all the foolish, lazy people, just as his father had always said they would.

If you want something to kick around the house, buy a dog.