Have a short story feature two situations, and then let them solve each other.

Science has so accustomed us to devising and accepting theories to account for the facts we observe, however fantastic, that our minds must begin their manufacture before we are aware of it.

Before you ask more questions, think about whether you really want to know the answers.

That was when I found out that the best way in the world to make yourself feel better when you have hit bottom is to try to get somebody else to feel better. There are certain things in life that are truly worth knowing, and that is one of the big ones.

It may be that the only reason childhood memories act on us so strongly is that, being the most remote we possess, they are the worst remembered and so offer the least resistance to that process by which we mold them nearer and nearer to an ideal which is fundamentally artistic, or at least nonfactual.

I was trapped in admiration for what I had once admired, as a fly in amber remains the captive of some long-vanished pine.

All novels are fantasies. Some are more honest about it.