Top 150 Robert R. McCammon Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “Seems to me a writer gets to hold a lot of keys,” she said. “Gets to visit a lot of worlds and live in a lot of skins. Seems to me a writer has a chance to live forever, if he’s good and if he’s lucky.”

— Robert R. McCammon

52. “Don’t think too hard,” she cautioned me. “Sometimes thinking gets in the way of doing.”

— Robert R. McCammon

53. “This is where I think the writing started. The “righting,” if you will. The righting of circumstances, the shaping of the world the way it should have been, had God not had crossed eyes and buck teeth. In the real world I had no power; in my world I was Hercules unchained.”

— Robert R. McCammon

54. “The devil is my strawberry!”

— Robert R. McCammon

55. “You know, no mistake in the world can’t be fixed. All it takes is wantin’ to fix it. Sometimes it’s hard, though. Sometimes it hurts to fix a mistake, but you have to do it no matter what.”

— Robert R. McCammon

56. “SPIIIIIDERS!” The world ceased its turning. The owl went dumb. The Milky Way flickered on the verge of extinction. Ben hollered it again: “Spiders!” He started thrashing wildly amid the pine needles. “They’re all over me!”

— Robert R. McCammon

57. “Matthew fell on his belly, the pain in his ribs making him curl up like a stomped worm.”

— Robert R. McCammon

58. “We all three were struck with the kind of horror that makes you want to dig a hole, jump in, and pull the hole in after you.”

— Robert R. McCammon

59. “Sometimes thinking gets in the way of doing.”

— Robert R. McCammon

60. “Boys want to hurry up and be men, and then comes a day they wish they could be boys again. But I’ll tell you a secret, Cory. Want to hear it?” I nodded. “No one,” Mrs. Neville whispered, “ever grows up.”

— Robert R. McCammon

61. “Swan was approaching, trying to run but being thrown off balance by the weight of her head.”

— Robert R. McCammon

62. “I had always wondered what Reverend Lovoy meant when he talked about “grace.” I understood it now. It was being able to give up something that it broke your heart to lose, and be happy about it.”

— Robert R. McCammon

63. “To my mother, the world was a vast quilt whose stitches were always coming undone.”

— Robert R. McCammon

64. “The color reminded Josh of what the summer sky had looked like when he himself was a child, with all the tomorrows before him and no place to go in any particular hurry.”

— Robert R. McCammon

65. “It was certainly a miracle that they were still alive, and a corpse that could sit up and speak was not something you saw every day.”

— Robert R. McCammon

66. “You see, it’s a girl’s life, too.”

— Robert R. McCammon

67. “Jesus Christ was as perfect as a human bein’ can be, yet he got mad and fought and wept and had days of feelin’ like he couldn’t go on another step. Like when the lepers and the sick folks almost trampled him down, all of ’em beggin’ for miracles and doggin’ him till he was about miracled out. What I’m sayin’, Mr. Mackenson, is that even Jesus Christ needed help sometimes, and he wasn’t too proud to ask for it.”

— Robert R. McCammon

68. “Josh Hutchins’s battered old Pontiac gave a wheeze like an old man with phlegm in his lungs.”

— Robert R. McCammon

69. “Love strong and true can get you through a lot of dookey. And I’m here to tell you, honey, you got to walk through many fields of dookey to get to be my age.”

— Robert R. McCammon

70. “It’s funny, sometimes, when you look at the people who brought you into this world and you see yourself so clearly in them.”

— Robert R. McCammon

71. “Dear sweet Jesus, come down in your flying saucer and take me with you!”

— Robert R. McCammon

72. “My lip healed. So did my head. My pride stayed bruised, though, and my confidence was fractured. Those injuries, the ones that didn’t show, I would have to live with.”

— Robert R. McCammon

73. “Just seconds of knowing and remembering. When people get weepy at movies, it’s because in that dark theater the golden pool of magic is touched, just briefly.”

— Robert R. McCammon

74. “The Basement was an underground shelter in Delaware where the first lady, the president’s seventeen-year-old son, ranking cabinet members and staff people would – they hoped – be protected from all but a direct hit by a one-megaton nuclear warhead.”

— Robert R. McCammon

75. “But my parents had taught me that everybody deserved respect, no matter if they were pansies or not, and to tell the truth, I was nothing to write home about in the physical looks department.”

— Robert R. McCammon

76. “The thing about adults is, when you want them to pay attention to you and intervene, their minds are worlds away; when you want them to be worlds away, they’re sitting on the back of your neck.”

— Robert R. McCammon

77. “You just give folks a key, and they can rightly open their own locks.”

— Robert R. McCammon

78. “You don’t have to come here to see them, Cory. Or to see me, either. You really don’t. You don’t have to leave what is, to visit what was.”

— Robert R. McCammon

79. “Writer? Author? Storyteller, that’s what I decided to be.”

— Robert R. McCammon

80. “I wanted no souvenirs of tragedy.”

— Robert R. McCammon

81. “Josh was beginning to believe the whole thing was like professional wrestling: the superpowers put on their masks and stomped around, roaring threats and swinging wildly at each other, but it was a game of macho, strutting bluff.”

— Robert R. McCammon

82. “New York is not a town constrained by a bedtime, sir.”

— Robert R. McCammon

83. “God A’mighty, what’s the point of livin’ if you don’t fight for what you hold dear?”

— Robert R. McCammon

84. “I think everybody has some eagle and some snake in them; they fight to pull your spirit high or drag it to the ground. The question is: which one do you let win, and at what price?”

— Robert R. McCammon

85. “It was a feeling in the crisp twilight air; it was a hush across the hills. The ghosts were gathering themselves, building up their strength to wander the fields of October and speak to those who would listen.”

— Robert R. McCammon

86. “Everything is born and dies. That is life.”

— Robert R. McCammon

87. “In later years I would think that no woman’s lips had ever been as red as that bike. No low-slung foreign sports car with wire wheels and purring engine would ever look as powerful or as capable as that bike. No chrome would ever gleam with such purity, like the silver moon on a summer’s night.”

— Robert R. McCammon

88. “But Sister’s bag was there like a shield, and the dagger punched through but couldn’t penetrate a frozen turkey dinner.”

— Robert R. McCammon

89. “Death had come in the night. And stripped bare everyone and everything but him.”

— Robert R. McCammon

90. “That’s where they make the books by the hundreds of thousands, and each one is a child different and special and some walk tall and some are crippled, but they all go out into the world from there.”

— Robert R. McCammon

91. “It wasn’t that he couldn’t fight when he had to, it was just that he knew when to fight and when not to fight.”

— Robert R. McCammon

92. “There was lightning behind Mr. Sayre’s eyes, and it was looking for a place to strike.”

— Robert R. McCammon

93. “But some good sense you listen to, and some good sense you can’t live with.”

— Robert R. McCammon

94. “Friends. They really know how to knock you off your pedestal, don’t they?”

— Robert R. McCammon

95. “And the need to hear stories, to live lives other than our own for even the briefest moment, is the key to the magic that was born in our bones.”

— Robert R. McCammon

96. “I popped the last Tylenol about three days before the bombs hit. A poem I was writing fell to pieces.”

— Robert R. McCammon

97. “The man don’t find Satan. Satan finds the man.”

— Robert R. McCammon

98. “God has a sense of humor that gets my goat sometimes.”

— Robert R. McCammon

99. “I want to be a child again, he thought as the other men at the table looked at him. Dear God, I don’t want to be at the controls anymore!”

— Robert R. McCammon

100. “I learned at an early age that outsized egos can destroy whatever they touch, and often stupid people stand in the way of any kind of creativity.”

— Robert R. McCammon