It is a good deal easier for most people to state an abstract idea than to describe and thus re-create some object they actually see.

In most good stories, it is the character's personality that creates the action of the story. If you start with real personality, a real character, then something is bound to happen.

She had observed that the more education they got, the less they could do. Their father had gone to a one-room schoolhouse through the eighth grade and he could do anything.

He knew something was going to happen and his entire system was waiting on it. He thought it was going to be one of the supreme moments in life but apart from that, he didn't have the vaguest notion what it might be. He pictured himself, after it was over, as an entirely new man, with an even better personality than he had now. He sat there for about fifteen minutes and nothing happened.

Art transcends its limitations only by staying within them.

I use the grotesque the way I do because people are deaf and dumb and need help to see and hear.

He had the feeling that everything he saw was a broken-off piece of some giant blank thing that he had forgotten had happened to him.