You’ll live in exile and die as you lived.
Laws, everything’s a chance, isn’t it?
A true King would not waste time justifying or explaining. He would simply state his will.
One rule of the road not directly stated elsewhere in this book: “The editor is always right.” The corollary is that no writer will take all of his or her editor’s advice; for all have sinned and fallen short of editorial perfection. Put another way, to write is human, to edit is divine.
The only contingency he had not learned how to bear was the possibility of his own madness.
It’s like you taught me to smoke marijuana and enjoy it, and now you’re saying, ‘If you like pot, you’ll really like heroin.
Do you know what made Poe great? And Machen and Lovecraft? A direct pipeline to the old subconscious. To the fears and twisted needs that swim around down there like phosphorescent fish.
When you fall, Barry, it’s going to be like the fall of Babel in the desert. The people who see you go down will talk about it for years. Man, you’ll shake the dishes right off the shelves -.
He kept seeing the brains dribbling down the wallpaper. It wasn’t the killing that stayed on his mind, it was the spilled talent. A lifetime of honing and shaping torn apart in less than a second. All those stories, all those images, and what came out looked like so much oatmeal. What was the point?
London never sleeps deeply, and its dreams are uneasy.
Childhood itself is a myth for almost all of us. We think we remember what happens to us when we were kids, but we don’t.
Crying harder than ever, because she knows he’s telling the truth about needing her. And being needed is a great thing. Maybe the great thing.
Inside its shell the three of them went about their early evening routine, like microbes trapped in the intestine of a monster.
Both of his parents were firm believers in better living through chemistry.
That could be just your imagination,” she says. “I don’t give a frig if it is,” I shot right back. “It’s how I feel.” “Yes,” she says, “it’s how you feel that’s important. I agree. Go on, Dolores.
And she knew someone was behind her even before the hand fell on her shoulder. NINE.
Writing, it seems to me, is a secret act – as secret as dreaming – and that was one aspect of this strange and dangerous craft I had never thought about much.
Jeanette was in for manslaughter; on a winter night in 2005 she had stabbed her husband, Damian, in the groin with a clutchhead screwdriver and because he was high he’d just sat in an armchair and let himself bleed to death.
Mrs. Bradley’s explanation: to make an irrevocable decision. What he learned later, sometimes to his sorrow, is that one comes upon most Rubicons unprepared.
Wake up, genius.