| | The devil's voice is sweet to hear. |
| | You want to know how cruel your God is? How fantastically cruel? ...Sometimes he makes us live. |
| | Hearts can break. Yes. Hearts can break. Sometimes I think it would be better if we died when they did, but we don't. |
| | It takes a son of a bitch to change a habit. |
| | Even good luck is just bad luck with its hair combed. |
| | Your pimples are the Lord's way of chastising you. |
| | Alone. Yes, that's the key word, the most awful word in the English tongue. Murder doesn't hold a candle to it and hell is only a poor synonym. |
| | There are a great many ways to commit suicide you know. |
| | Talent is a dull knife that will cut nothing unless it is wielded with great force. |
| | Remember, Hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies. |
| | If being a kid is about learning how to live, then being a grown-up is about learning how to die. |
| | Oh, about beer I never lie. A man who lies about beer makes enemies. |
| | Some things it don't pay to be curious about. |
| | Love is like dying. |
| | I believe the road to hell is paved with adverbs, and I will shout it from the rooftops. |
| | If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot. |
| | Creative people probably do run a greater risk of alcoholism and addiction than those in some other jobs, but so what? We all look pretty much the same when we're puking in the gutter. |
| | Each life makes its own imitation of immortality. |
| | Fiction is the truth inside the lie. |
| | French is the language that turns dirt into romance. |
| | I am the literary equivalent of a Big Mac and Fries. |
| | I don't take notes; I don't outline, I don't do anything like that. I just flail away at the goddamn thing. I'm a salami writer. I try to write good salami, but salami is salami. You can't sell it as caviar. |
| | Unlocated speech, 1995 |
| | I think that marijuana should not only be legal, I think it should be a cottage industry. It would be wonderful for the state of Maine. There's some pretty good homegrown dope. I'm sure it would be even better if you could grow it with fertilizers and have greenhouses. |
| | I work until beer o'clock. |
| | I've taken off two months, three months, at a time, and, by the end, I get really squirrelly. My night life, my dream life, gets extremely populated and crazed. |
| | It's better to be good than evil, but one achieves goodness at a terrific cost. |
| | No, it's not a very good story - its author was too busy listening to other voices to listen as closely as he should have to the one coming from inside. |
| | Nobody was really surprised when it happened, not really, not on the subconscious level where savage things grow. |
| | Only enemies speak the truth; friends and lovers lie endlessly, caught in the web of duty. |
| | People think that I must be a very strange person. This is not correct. I have the heart of a small boy. It is in a glass jar on my desk. |
| | The trust of the innocent is the liar's most useful tool. |
| | You can't deny laughter; when it comes, it plops down in your favorite chair and stays as long as it wants. |