The customers were mainly people middle-aged or older, and they’d probably take a sledge hammer to anything that spewed out the top forty. This was Lawrence Welk country. A wild tune was a polka.

Merridale was as self-centered as a Broadway star on opening night.

Garris had pet names for all of them. Mahler was the Mad Doktor. Franz Liszt was Son of Lovecraft. Mendelssohn was Santa Claus Meets the Hell’s Angels. Beethoven was the High School Principal.

It’s just that I think we should be responsible for our friends, is all. If we’re not, why bother to have friends?

Fay generously accepted this failing, and did without her brood, and tried not to overwhelm Robin with all the love she was meant to lavish on a houseful of kids. Her religion truly meant something to her, and she was ennobled by it. Her husband, on the other hand, dug into his Bible like a cave, burrowing away from life, which he hated. He wanted only one thing from life, and that was his Heavenly reward for having endured it.

This is an age when men hide their deepest fears and instincts behind a mask of rationality. Mankind has become a herd of sheep which does not believe in the existence of wolves.

If you got the chance, you acted. If you sat back and waited and hoped that something good would come along and save you, or fix what you were too frightened or weak or stupid to fix for yourself, you could wait a lifetime and still be trapped.

Gossip? Me? How would I know about such things?” “Don’t think of it as gossip. Think of it as rumor and innuendo.

There’s nothing like a headless corpse to bring a touch of excitement into one’s life.

If I had stayed purely a horror writer or thriller writer, I might have more of a presence in those particular genres, and I'd certainly have more individual titles to market, since it's much easier to write pure genre fiction than it is to create something different.