"That's right, you tell Sheriff John. You-all need to be on your guard. They're apt to come locked and loaded. There's a town in Maine, Jerusalem's Lot, and you could ask the people who lived there about the men in the black cars. If you could find any people, that is. They all disappeared forty or more years ago. George Allman talks about that town all the time." "Got it." She went to the door, serape swishing, then turned. "You don't believe me, and I ain't a bit surprised. Why would I be? I been the town weirdo for years before you came, and if the Lord doesn't take me, I'll be the town weirdo years after you're gone." "Annie, I never-" "Hush." She stared at him fiercely from beneath her sombrero. "It's all right. But pay attention, now. I'm telling you... but he told me. That boy. So that's two of us, all right? And you remember what I said. They come in black cars."

“French is the language that turns dirt into romance.”

“There was a perfunctory knock at the door, and then Rosalind stuck her head in, looking apologetic. "I'm sorry to disturb you, ma'am, but it's Fred Clark, asking to see you. He seems-" "Refresh me. Who is Fred Clark?" Mrs. Sigsby took off her reading glasses and rubbed the sides of her nose. "One of the janitors." "Find out what he wants and tell me later. If we've got mice chewing the wiring again, it can wait. I'm busy." "He says it's important, and he seems extremely upset." Mrs. Sigsby sighed, closed the folder, and put it in a drawer. "All right, send him in. But this had better be good." It wasn't. It was bad. Very.”

“In these silences, something may rise”

“Ninety-five percent of people who walk the earth are simply inert. One percent are saints, and one percent are assholes. The other three percent are people who do what they say they can do.”

“She stood and turned around and of course there was nothing there. But she could see him standing there, his hands jammed deep into his pockets, that easy, crooked grin on his pleasant-rather-than-handsome face, leaning lanky and at ease against a monument or one of the stone gateposts or maybe just a tree gone red with fall's dying fire.”

“The Tommyknockers is an awful book. That was the last one I wrote before I cleaned up my act. And I've thought about it a lot lately and said to myself, "There's really a good book in here, underneath all the sort of spurious energy that cocaine provides, and I ought to go back." The book is about 700 pages long, and I'm thinking, "There's probably a good 350-page novel in there.”