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Yet Suppose Further. Suppose That All Worlds, All Universes, Met At A Single Nexus, A Single Pylon, A Tower. And Within It, A Stairway, Perhaps Rising To The Godhead Itself. Would You Dare Climb To The Top, Gunslinger? Could It Be That Somewhere Above All Of Endless Reality, There Exists A Room?...' You Dare Not.' And In The Gunslinger's Mind, Those Words Echoed: You Dare Not.

-Stephen King

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Yet Suppose Further. Suppose

Stephen King

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Yet Suppose Further. Suppose That All Worlds, All Universes, Met At A Single Nexus, A Single Pylon, A Tower. And Within It, A Stairway, Perhaps Rising To The Godhead Itself. Would You Dare Climb To The Top, Gunslinger? Could It Be That Somewhere Above All Of Endless Reality, There Exists A Room?...' You Dare Not.' And In The Gunslinger's Mind, Those Words Echoed: You Dare Not.

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Dark Tower Series

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What A Paragon Of Virtue You Are, Gunslinger!" The Man In Black Laughed.

Love Among The Ruins... I'll Tell You Something, My Friend: Weird Love's Better Than No Love At All.

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Even The Company Of The Mad Was Better Than The Company Of The Dead.

Bad Chances Were Better Than No Chances.

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And Didn't They Say That, Although Curiosity Killed The Cat, Satisfaction Brought The Beast Back?

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The Past Is Obdurate. It Doesn't Want To Change.

Not Every Book Has To Be Loaded With Symbolism, Irony, Or Musical Language, But It Seems To Me That Every Book-at Least Every One Worth Reading-is About Something.

If You Liked Being A Teenager, There's Something Really Wrong With You.

Being A Teenager

Everyone Needs A Hobby, He Said. And Everyone Needs A Miracle Or Two, Just To Prove Life Is More Than Just One Long Trudge From The Cradle To The Grave.

Semi-facetiously, When People Ask Me Why I Write These Kinds Of Stories, I Simply Say That I Was Warped As A Child. And, There Is Some Truth To That.

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Man May Have Been Made In The Image Of God, But Human Society Was Made In The Image Of His Opposite Number, And Is Always Trying To Get Back Home.

I Know Your Mother Lives In Your Head - Almost Everyone's Mother Does, I Guess - But You Can't Let Her Have Her Way On This One

Time Takes It All, Whether You Want It To Or Not.

You Know How It's Going To End, But Instead Of Spoiling Things, That Somehow Increases Your Fascination. It's Like Watching A Kid Run His Electric Train Faster And Faster And Waiting For It To Derail On One Of The Curves.

He Thrusts His Fists Against The Posts And Still Insists He Sees The Ghosts.

I Tend To Scare Myself.

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Come To A Book As You Would Come To An Unexplored Land. Come Without A Map. Explore It, And Draw Your Own Map.... A Book Is Like A Pump. It Gives Nothing Unless First You Give To It.

Now Comes The Big Question: What Are You Going To Write About? And The Equally Big Answer: Anything You Damn Well Want. Anything At All .... As Long As You Tell The Truth.

Lawyers Are Fleas On The Hide Of Human Nature.

We Sometimes Need To Create Unreal Monsters And Bogies To Stand In For All The Things We Fear In Our Real Lives.

I Have To Remind Myself That Some Birds Aren’t Meant To Be Caged. Their Feathers Are Just Too Bright.

I Am The Literary Equivalent Of A Big Mac And Fries.

Books And Movies Are Like Apples And Oranges. They Both Are Fruit, But Taste Completely Different.

Semi-automatic S Have Only Two Purposes. One Is So Owners Can Take Them To The Shooting Range Once In A While, Yell Yeehaw, And Get All Horny At The Rapid Fire And The Burning Vapor Spurting From The End Of The Barrel. Their Other Use-their Only Other Use-is To Kill People.

Terror?often Arises From A Pervasive Sense Of Disestablishment; That Things Are In The Unmaking.

... Don't Let Your Elders And Supposed Betters Tell You Any Different. Sure, You've Never Been To Paris. No, You Never Ran With The Bulls At Pamploma. Yes, You're A Pissant Who Had No Hair In Your Armpits Until Three Years Ago - But So What? If You Don't Start Out Too Big For Your Britches, How Are You Gonna Fill 'em When You Grow Up? Let It Rip Regardless Of What Anybody Tells You, That's My Idea; Sit Down An Smoke That Baby.

Good Books Don't Give Up All Their Secrets At Once.

And I Guess You Judge How Well You're Doing By How Well You Sleep At Night... And What Your Dreams Are Like.

And As A Writer, One Of The Things That I've Always Been Interested In Doing Is Actually Invading Your Comfort Space. Because That's What We're Supposed To Do. Get Under Your Skin, And Make You React.

See The Bear Of Fearsome Size! All The World's Within His Eyes. Time Grows Thin, The Past Is A Riddle; The Tower Awaits You In The Middle.

There Are Really Very Few Economies Of Scale In Centralising Or Standardising Advertising.

Your Pimples Are The Lord's Way Of Chastising You. Now Eat Your Pie.

Don't Let The Door Hitcha Where The Good Lord Splitcha.

The Color White Is The Absence Of Memory.

Stories Are Relics, Part Of An Undiscovered Pre-existing World.

You Cannot Hope To Sweep Someone Else Away By The Force Of Your Writing Until It Has Been Done To You.

The Situation Comes First...the Characters...come Next...[then] Begin To Narrate.

It Was As Hysterical As A Woman Having A Hot Flash.

There Are, Occasionally, Writers Who Are Able To Combine Both Story And Style. They Are, Of Course, The Best. You Get A Spectacular View And You Also Get To Look At It From The Backseat Of A Chauffeur-driven Cadillac. In The Field Of Fantasy, Those Writers Able To Combine Story-as-narration With Story-as-style Are Even Rarer. But There Are A Few...the Late Theodore Sturgeon, The Early Ray Bradbury...and Richard Christian Matheson. A Brilliant Chip Off The Old Block.

Must You Write Complete Sentences Each Time, Every Time? Perish The Thought. If Your Work Consists Only Of Fragments And Floating Clauses, The Grammar Police Aren't Going To Come And Take You Away. Even William Strunk, That Mussolini Of Rhetoric, Recognized The Delicious Pliability Of Language. "it Is An Old Observation," He Writes, "that The Best Writers Sometimes Disregard The Rules Of Rhetoric." Yet He Goes On To Add This Thought, Which I Urge You To Consider: "unless He Is Certain Of Doing Well, [the Writer] Will Probably Do Best To Follow The Rules."

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...

Let's Face It. No Kid In High School Feels As Though They Fit In.

I Don't Take Notes; I Don't Outline, I Don't Do Anything Like That. I Just Flail Away At The Goddamn Thing. I'm A Salami Writer. I Try To Write Good Salami, But Salami Is Salami. You Can't Sell It As Caviar.

I Think Most Of Us Can Remember From Our Own Childhood, Just In The Disney Cartoons, Things That Frightened Us Profoundly. For Me It Was Bambi, The Scene When The Forest Was On Fire. That Was Something I Had Nightmares About. I Can't Imagine Being A Little Kid Of Eight And Seeing Night Of The Living Dead With Living Corpses Eating The Flesh Of Living People.

Whenever I Publish A Book, I Feel Like A Trapper Caught By The Iroquois. They're All Lined Up With Tomahawks, And The Idea Is To Run Through With Your Head Down, And Everybody Gets To Take A Swing. They Hit You In The Head, The Back, The Ass, And The Balls.

And In Real Life Endings Aren't Always Neat, Whether They're Happy Endings, Or Whether They're Sad Endings.

This Is Probably The Single Great Subject Of Horror Fiction: Our Need To Cope With A Mystery That Can Be Understood Only With The Aid Of A Helpful Imagination.

When Love Leaves The World, All Hearts Are Still. Tell Them Of My Love And Tell Them Of My Pain And Tell Them Of My Hope, Which Still Lives. For This Is All I Have And All I Am And All I Ask.

There Are Lots Of Guys Out There Who Write A Better Prose Line Than I Do And Who Have A Better Understanding Of What People Are Really Like And What Humanity Is Supposed To Mean - Hell, I Know That.

A Man Without A Sense Of Purpose, Even One Whose Bank Accounts Are Stuffed With Money, Is Always A Small Man.

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Walter F. Mondale

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