The Stand

When asked, "How do you write?" I invariably answer, "One word at a time," and the answer is invariably dismissed. But that is all it is. It sounds too simple to be true, but consider the Great Wall of China, if you will: one stone at a time, man. That's all. One stone at a time. But I've read you can see that motherfucker from space without a telescope.

Marsha, who was looking at the map over her father's shoulder, said: "It says Jesse James robbed the bank here, Daddy. Twice." "Fuck Jesse James," Ed grumped. "Ed!" Trish cried. "Sorry," he said, not feeling sorry in the least. He drove on.

Trouble is something you have always looked around for when you couldn't just turn your head and see it. Sometimes I think you'd cross the street to step in dogshit. God

There were the smells of dust and oil and pipesmoke, and it seemed to her now that there should be a rule: every father must smoke. Pipe, cigar, cigarette, marijuana, hash, lettuce leaves, something. Because the smell of smoke seemed an integral part of her own childhood.

He was a clot looking for a place to happen, a splinter of bone hunting a soft organ to puncture, a lonely lunatic cell looking for a mate—they would set up housekeeping and raise themselves a cozy little malignant tumor.

dreams are the psyche's way of taking a good dump every now and then. And that people who don't dream—or don't dream in a way they can often remember when they wake up—are mentally constipated in some way. After all, the only practical compensation for having a nightmare is waking up and realizing it was all just a dream."

He finished with a snappy salute at the building he thought might be the Bennington courthouse, then turned around, thinking the best way to start another year of independence in the good old U.S. of A. would be with a good old all-American fuck.

He was not a talkative man, but he did not care much for being alone, and never had.

The black man wanted—was able—only to unshape. Anti-Christ? You might as well say anti-creation.

It was an inadequacy dream. It expressed that one simple overriding fear: What if you cant? What if you want to, but you can't? The terror of being unable to make the simple leap of faith which is the place where any artist—singer, writer, painter, musician—begins.

Someone had fiddled when he should have faddled, and a nuclear weapon had gone off … and one hellish big one, from the look and the feel.