If you get the landscape right, the characters will step out of it, and they'll be in the right place.

He pressed his face into the fabric and breathed in slowly through his mouth and nose, hoping for the faintest smoke and mountain sage and salty sweet stink of Jack but there was no real scent, only the memory of it, the imagined power of Brokeback Mountain of which nothing was left but what he held in his hands.

All the travelin I ever done is going around the coffeepot looking for the handle.

Anyway, there's something wrong with everybody and it's up to you to know what you can handle.

For if Jack Buggit could escape from the pickle jar, if a bird with a broken neck could fly away, what else might be possible? Water may be older than light, diamonds crack in hot goat's blood, mountaintops give off cold fire, forests appear in mid-ocean, it may happen that a crab is caught with the shadow of a hand on its back, and that the wind be imprisoned in a bit of knotted string. And it may be that love sometimes occurs without pain or misery.

In a rough way the short story writer is to the novelist as a cabinetmaker is to a house carpenter.

I would rather be dead than not read