We went to the New York World's Fair, saw what the past had been like, according to the Ford Motor Car Company and Walt Disney, saw what the future would be like, according to General Motors. And I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep.

Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.

For some people, getting pregnant is as easy as catching cold." And there certainly was an analogy there: Colds and babies were both caused by germs which loved nothing so much as a mucous membrane.

You meet saints everywhere. They can be anywhere. They are people behaving decently in an indecent society.

If there really had been a Mercutio, and if there really were a Paradise, Mercutio might be hanging out with teenage Vietnam draftee casualties now, talking about what it felt like to die for other people's vanity and foolishness.

Bad guys turned informer. Good guys didn't - no matter when, no matter what.

...when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, present, and future, always have existed, always will exist.