Nightmares and Dreamscapes

When I was a kid I believed everything I was told, everything I read, and every dispatch sent out by my own overheated imagination. This made for more than a few sleepless nights, but it also filled the world I lived in with colors and textures I would not have traded for a lifetime of restful nights.

What about reality, you ask? Well, as far as I'm concerned, reality can go take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut.

For me, the imagination which so often kept me awake and in terror as a child has seen me through some terrible bouts of stark raving reality as an adult.

Sometimes you could get rid of the ghosts that were haunting your life if you could only work up enough courage to face them.

I don’t talk about this much, because it embarrasses me and it sounds pompous, but I still see stories as a great thing, something which not only enhances lives but actually saves them.

Better to be a mouse behind the wainscoting, nibbling at the wires. Better to be a spider, high up under the eaves, spinning its web.

What are you planning?” “I think you’ve already guessed,” I said. “I have spent the last thirty-six hours digging the world’s longest grave, and now I’m going to bury you in your fucking Cadillac.

London never sleeps deeply, and its dreams are uneasy.

This had not happened because they were evil people; it had not happened because the old gods were punishing them; it had happened because they had gotten lost in the woods, that was all, and getting lost in the woods was a thing that could happen to anybody.

That’s not to say there isn’t magic involved in writing; I happen to believe that there is, and that it twines around fiction with particular luxuriance

Wait for the storm to end and then enjoy the sunshine,

God I am unlucky. I don't hate You, but I fear You are not my friend, nor any man's friend.

Just as John Graham was beginning to wonder if maybe the dog was dead, it lifted its tail and farted.

Well, as far as I’m concerned, reality can go take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut.

London was asleep . . . but London never sleeps deeply, and its dreams are uneasy.

A regular man is a happy man,

my mangled hands making rough approximations of fists.

I sat for a minute, watching membranes of sand skirl across the desert,

They went in. And did not pass Go. And did not collect two hundred dollars. They went directly to bed.

hard work is the only acceptable practice for those of us who have some talent but little or no genius.

Thousands would have called him cold, and they would not have been wrong, precisely, but he also had a large heart.

One becomes inured even to insight,

We believe we know a great lot, with our instruments and things, but I was old enough then to believe we don’t know half as much as we think we do, and old enough now to believe we never will.

A man who would beat his wife is an abomination; a woman who would allow it an abomination and a perplexity.

success, she firmly believed, depended as much on the little things as on the big ones.

Sometimes his syntax was garbled and his modifiers misplaced, but he had such flaws—which plague most writers all their lives—

It’s only when a man like me stops laughing that people wonder if something is wrong.

men who are really more like wolves than men, develop a sort of sixth sense when it comes to danger.