“What you write down sometimes leaves you forever, like old photographs left in the bright sun, fading to nothing but white. I pray for that sort of release.”

“The sun had bled away every smell and left nothing.”

“You know," King said, "I'm not much good at telling stories. That sounds like a paradox, but it's not; it's the reason I write them down.”

“What comes in when daylight leaves is a kind of certainty: that beneath the skin there is a secret, some mystery both black and bright. You feel this mystery in every breath, you see it in every shadow, you expect to plunge into it at every turn of a step.”

“Pray for rain all you like, but dig a well as you do it.”

“so here he sits one drunk nigger in a puclic libary after closing, with the book open in front of me and the bottle of Old Kentucky on my left. 'Tell the truth and shame the devil,' my mom used to say , but she forgot to tell me that sometimes you can't shame Mr Splitfoot sober. The Irish know, but of course they're God's white niggers and who knows maybe they're a step ahead.”

“Bad writing is more than a matter of shit syntax and faulty observation; bad writing usually arises from a stubborn refusal to tell stories about what people actually do― to face the fact, let us say, that murderers sometimes help old ladies cross the street.”