She upset Billy simply by being his mother. She made him feel embarrassed and ungrateful and weak because she had gone to so much trouble to give him life, and to keep that life going, and Billy didn't really like life at all.

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.

Future generations will look back on TV as the lead in the water pipes that slowly drove the Romans mad.

War is now a form of TV entertainment, and what made the First World War so particularly entertaining were two American inventions, barbed wire and the machine gun.

But he is tired. He puts the pistol to his head again. He says, “I never asked to be born in the first place.

All persons, living and dead, are purely coincidental.

The insane, on occasion, are not without their charms.