Film fixes a precise visual image in the viewer's head. In fiction, you just hope you're precise enough to convey the intended effect.

I have always tended toward a lush prose style, but I take care to modulate it from story to story and to strip it down entirely when necessary.

The map had been the first form of misdirection, for what is a map but a way of emphasizing some things and making other things invisible?

I always try to be alert to the potential for repetition, for a decaying orbit with regard to my use of technique, etc.

Film fixes a precise visual image in the viewer's head. In fiction, you just hope you're precise enough to convey the intended effect.

The city might be savage, stray dogs might share the streets with grimy urchins whose blank eyes reflected the knowledge that they might soon be covered over, blinded forever, by the same two pennies just begged from some gentleman, and no one in the fuming, fulminous boulevards of trade might know who actually ran Ambergris-or, if anyone ran it at all, but, like a renegade clock, it ran on and wound itself heedless, empowered by the insane weight of its own inertia, the weight of its own citizenry.

That's how the madness of the world tries to colonize you: from the outside in, forcing you to live in its reality.