Top 150 Robert R. McCammon Quotes (2026 Update)
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51. “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

52. “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

53. “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

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

— Robert R. McCammon

55. “The devil is my strawberry!”

— Robert R. McCammon

56. “No doubt about it, summer was on the wane. The mornings seemed a shade cooler. The nights were hungry, and ate more daylight.”

— Robert R. McCammon

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

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

— Robert R. McCammon

60. “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

61. “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

62. “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

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

— Robert R. McCammon

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

— Robert R. McCammon

65. “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

66. “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

67. “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

68. “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

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

— Robert R. McCammon

70. “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

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

— Robert R. McCammon

72. “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

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

— Robert R. McCammon

74. “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

75. “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

76. “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

77. “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

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

— Robert R. McCammon

79. “It hit me who they were talking about. Mrs. Neville. My Mrs. Neville. The teacher who’d said I should enter the short-story contest this year. Good-bye, she’d said as I’d left her room on the first day of summer. Not see you next year or see you in September, but a firm and final good-bye. She must’ve known she was dying, as she sat behind that desk in summer’s light, and she had known that for her there would be no new class of grinning young monkeys in September.”

— Robert R. McCammon

80. “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

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

— Robert R. McCammon

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

— Robert R. McCammon

83. “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

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

— Robert R. McCammon

86. “I wanted no souvenirs of tragedy.”

— Robert R. McCammon

87. “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

88. “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

89. “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

90. “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

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

— Robert R. McCammon

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

— Robert R. McCammon

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

— Robert R. McCammon

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

— Robert R. McCammon

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

— Robert R. McCammon

96. “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

97. “He had turned nine only six days ago, but now he felt very old because Papa wasn’t home yet and those fire-demons were laughing.”

— Robert R. McCammon

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

— Robert R. McCammon

99. “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

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

— Robert R. McCammon