Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them in order that the reader may see what they are made of.
Kurt VonnegutTrout, incidentally, had written a book about a money tree. It had twenty-dollar bills for leaves. Its flowers were government bonds. Its fruit was diamonds. It attracted human beings who killed each other around the roots and made very good fertilizer.
Kurt VonnegutIt was a thunderingly beautiful experience-voluptuous, sexual, dangerous, and expensive as hell.
Kurt VonnegutWe have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down.
Kurt Vonnegut