Stephen King

Put your vocabulary on the top shelf of your toolbox, and don't make any conscious effort to improve it... One of the really bad things you can do to your writing is to dress up the vocabulary, looking for long words because you're maybe a little bit ashamed of your shot ones. This is like dressing up a household pet in evening clothes. The pet is embarrassed and the person who committed this act of pre-meditated cuteness should be even more embarrassed. Make yourself a solemn promise right now that you'll never use 'emolument' when you mean 'tip' and you'll never say 'John stopped long enough to perform an act of excretion' when you mean 'John stopped long enough to take a shit'. If you believe 'take a shit' would be considered offensive or inappropriate by your audience, feel free to say 'John stopped long enough to move his bowels'...

Mr Gray didn't care much for Jonesy's body (or so he told himself; in truth it was hard not to feel at least some affection for something capable of providing such unexpected pleasures as 'bacon' and 'murder'), but it did have to take him another couple of hundred miles.

Anyway, as the old barrelhouse song says, My God, how the money rolled in. Norton must have subscribed to the old Puritan notion that the best way to figure out which folks God favours is by checking their bank acounts.

He__ my cat! He__ not God__ cat! Let God have his own cat! Let God have all the damn old cats He wants, and kill them all! Church is mine!

I think part of being a parent is trying to kill your kids.

Some birds are not meant to be caged, that's all. Their feathers are too bright, their songs too sweet and wild.

In here I'm the guy who can get things for you... outside all you need is the Yellow Pages. I don't think I could make it.

Dreams are a simple psychological emetic, and people who have them are more blessed than cursed

Dreams, after all, are insubstantial things, like mist itself.

I think that, even if we forget each other, we'll remember in our dreams.

In nightmares we can think the worst. That's what they're for, I guess.

Come on, Doctor... we got places to go.

The eyes were damned, the staring, glaring eyes of one who sees but does not see, eyes ever turned inward to the sterile hell of dreams beyond control, dreams unleashed, risen out of the stinking swamps of the unconscious.

Like all sweet dreams, it will be brief, but brevity makes sweetness, doesn't it?

You grew up, became a man, had to adjust to taking less than you hoped for; you discovered the dream-machine had a big OUT OF ORDER sign on it.

And the shooting will happen so fast and be over so quick that you'll wonder what all the planning and palaver was for, when in the end it always comes down to the same five minutes' worth of blood, pain, and stupidity.

... it would matter ... to the tens of thousands of young Americans ... who would ... be invited to put on uniforms, fly to the other side of the world, spread their nether cheeks, and sit down on the big green dildo that was Vietnam.

Do they see the lethal insanity of a race to the brink of oblivion, and then over the edge? Apparently not. If they did, surely they wouldn't be racing to begin with. Or is it a simple failure of imagination? One doesn't like to think such a rudimentary failing could bring about the end, yet...