“Pleasure, I remind myself, is inseparable from its lawfully wedded mate, pain.”

“Writing is a habit, an addiction, as powerful and overmastering an urge as putting a bottle to your lips or a spike in your arm. Call it the impulse to make something out of nothing, call it an obs...”

“I've always been a quitter. I quit the Boy Scouts, the glee club, the marching band. Gave up my paper route, turned my back on the church, stuffed the basketball team. I dropped out of college, sid...”

“But then, thats the beauty of writing storieseach one is an exploratory journey in search of a reason and a shape. And when you find that reason and that shape, theres no feeling like it.", 3:AM Ma...”

“First you have nothing, and then, astonishingly, after ripping out your brain and your heart and betraying your friends and ex-lovers and dreaming like a zombie over the page till you can't see or ...”

“In order to create you have to believe in your ability to do so and that often means excluding whole chunks of normal life, and, of course, pumping yourself up as much as possible as a way of keepi...”

“A blank cheque kills creativity.”

“...the imagination is unleashed by constraints. You break out of the box by stepping into shackles.”

“Why write? Life is a cage of empty words.”

“Ive been fighting to be who I am all my life. Whats the point of being who I am, if I cant have the person who was worth all the fighting for?”

“Nobody can hurt me without my permission.”

“We got a fightin' side a mile wide, but we pray for peace 'cause it's mostly us that end up servin' overseas.”

“If we could survive without a wife, citizens of Rome, all of us would do without that nuisance; but since nature has so decreed that we cannot manage comfortably with them, nor live in any way with...”

“When we are at peace within our marriage, the effects can be astounding! We will raise happier children, become better employees, and overall find the joy in life.”

“Some people claim that marriage interferes with romance. There's no doubt about it. Anytime you have a romance, your wife is bound to interfere.”