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

Nothing on earth in fiction is less interesting than characters under the influence of alcohol.

Sometimes, in that darkness, there is a single act of love, some selfless gesture, an aspiration, and we see that it's not been all waste, all hopeless, and we can ... well ... go on.

Let good people sin. Give virtue to rotters.

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

You must get beyond divertissement, sketch, anecdote, the interesting moment. You must get to the mystery of human personality. What is the line of the story that leads us to a point where we see or intuit something we haven't before?

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.