Let good people sin. Give virtue to rotters.

Obscenities are too often used for shock value, as a kind of shorthand for real expression of emotion. You've got to scale down your monstrosities. A scream is not a discovery.

Uninvited criticism is insult.

Using language like jungle growth isn't the solution to telling a story.

What a strange thing it is to recognize a sound like the shriek of a wounded animal, when you've never heard the shriek of a wounded animal.

A short story is a writer's way of thinking through experience... Journalism aims at accuracy, but fiction's aim is truth. The writer distorts reality in the interest of a larger truth.

Plot does not simply move with time, but spreads out conceptually in metaphorical space.