No one can call themselves a writer until he or she has written at least fifty stories.

For me, boviscopophobia is an even stronger motive than semi-agoraphobia for staying on the ship when we're in port.

The boy, who did everything well and with a natural unslumped grace the wraith himself had always lacked, and whom the wraith had been so terribly eager to see and hear and let him (the son) know he was seen and heard, the son had become a steadily more and more hidden boy, toward the wraith's life's end; and no one else in the wraith and the boy's nuclear family would see or acknowledge this, the fact that the graceful and marvelous boy was disappearing, right before their eyes. They looked but did not see his invisibility.

Do this: hate him for me after I die. I beg you. Dying request.

sarcasm and jokes were often the bottle in which clinical depressives sent out their most plangent screams for someone to care and help them.

The reason ... our pervasive cultural irony is at once so powerful and so unsatisfying is that an ironist is impossible to pin down.

Mario, what do you get when you cross an insomniac, an unwilling agnostic and a dyslexic?