“My girl has got a bun in her oven, and I guess you know who did the damn cooking.”

“I know your mother lives in your head - almost everyone's mother does, I guess - but you can't let her have her way on this one”

“Well, I guess that in the computer magazines God is more often spelled Gates, but you know what I mean.”

“To those readers who feel that I didn't know any better, I assert that I did ... but the temptation was simply too great to resist.”

“I had worked for a newspaper of sorts, word got around, and I became editor of our local school newspaper, The Drum. I don't recall being given any choice in this matter; I think I was simply appointed. My second-in-command, Danny Emond, had even less interest in the paper than I did. Danny just liked the idea that Room 4, where we did our work, was near the girls' bathroom. "Someday I'll just go crazy and hack my way in there, Steve," he told me on more than one occasion. "Hack, hack, hack." Once he added, perhaps in an effort to justify himself: "The prettiest girls in school pull up their skirts in there." This struck me as so fundamentally stupid it might actually be wise, like a Zen Koan or an early story by John Updike.”

“I do not aim with my hand; he who aims with his hand has forgotten the face of his father.I aim with my eye.I do not shoot with my hand; he who shoots with his hand has forgotten the face of his father.I shoot with my mind.I do not kill with my gun; he who kills with his gun has forgotten the face of his father.I kill with my heart.”

“I sit on the bench in front of Bell's Market and think about Homer Buckland and about the beautiful girl who leaned over to open his door when he come down that path with the full red gasoline can in his right hand - she looked like a girl of no more than sixteen, a girl on her learner's permit, and her beauty was terrible, but I believe it would no longer kill the man it turned itself on; for a moment her eyes lit on me, I was not killed, although a part of me died at her feet." (from the short story Mrs. Todd's Shortcut)”