Many, if not most, countries blithely expect their citizens to have carte blanche access to the U.S., "land of immigrants," as a veritable human right, but put up all manner of barriers to Americans who want to emigrate in the opposite direction.

So many stories are determined before they start.

Time itself made all things rare.

You can call it innocence, or you can call it gullibility, but Celia made the most common mistake of the good-hearted: she assumed that everyone else was just like her.

For the living, death is thievery.

In the big picture I write for an audience of people I've never met. By the final draft I'm looking for anything in the prose that's prospectively boring to strangers.

In fact, it's become politically important to offend people, because we have to fight back against this notion that being offensive should be against the law or something, and that everyone supposedly deserves "respect" for their often dopy views.