There is no Idea Dump, no Story Central, no Island of the Buried Bestsellers; good stories seem to come quite literally from nowhere, sailing at you right out of the empty sky.
There’s nothing as human as hunger. There’s no creation without talent, I give you that, but talent is cheap. Talent goes begging. Hunger is the piston of art.
The unconscious mind writes poetry if it’s left alone.
A man who can’t bear to share his habits is a man who needs to quit them.
Symbolism exists to adorn and enrich, not to create an artificial sense of profundity.
Directing teenage actors is like juggling jars of nitro-glycerine: exhilarating and dangerous.
It is, after all, the dab of grit that seeps into an oyster’s shell that makes the pearl, not pearl-making seminars with other oysters.
Beating heroin is child’s play compared to beating your childhood.
All I ask is that you do as well as you can, and remember that, while to write adverbs is human, to write he said or she said is divine.
Did-a-chick? Dum-a-chum? Dad-a-cham? Ded-a-chek?
I’m most afraid of losing my mind. You lose your identity, your sense of who you are, where you are.
I think we tend to write out our phobias.
Trust, a sense of humor, and don’t let the sun go down on an argument without trying to make it up. That’s all I know about good marriage. I’ve been married a long time – it seems to be working.
I think a lot of times dreams are nothing more than a kind of mental or spiritual flatulence. They’re a way of relieving pressure.
Teaching school is like having jumper cables hooked to your brain, draining all the juice out of you.
Marriage is referred to in the bible as “mystical union,” and it really is in the sense that two people who don’t know each other get together. I’m always interested in how much you find out about the other person and how much you don’t find out.
This is probably the single great subject of horror fiction: our need to cope with a mystery that can be understood only with the aid of a helpful imagination.
I think it is harder to write a story that appeals to the intellect. But, when you tie onto one, you can do it quite deeply. It really depends on the type of idea you have to begin with.
The best show on television is Red Sox baseball. Everything else sucks.
One of life’s great truths is this: when one is about to be struck by a speeding six-hundred pound Coke machine, one need worry about little else.