"If your insanity leads you to carve up women like Jack the Ripper or the Cleveland Torso Murderer, we clap you away in the funny farm (but neither of those two amateur-night surgeons was ever caught, …"

"I recognize terror as the finest emotion and so I will try to terrorize the reader. But if I find that I cannot terrify, I will try to horrify; and if I find that I cannot horrify, I'll go for the gro…"

"I never had a bad time in the library. I never had a bad time in a bookstore."

"I go out to my little office, where I've got a manuscript, and the last page I was happy with is on top. I read that, and it's like getting on a taxiway. I'm able to go through and revise it and put m…"

"Books are a uniquely portable magic."