I have a good memory for words, and when I come upon a word I don't know, I remember it, or try to - it's almost like a tic.

There was a sort of irony in the fact that these [superhero] characters - many of whom in that period, the Golden Age, had been evolved to fight the Nazis - were themselves very much in the Nazi ideal. The idea that you can solve problems through physical strength, by being stronger and more dominant and more powerful - that is fascism. I mean, that's it, that's the essence of fascism. I don't think the creators of the superheroes or the kids who were reading them at the time were the slightest bit aware of it.

My Saturday Night. My Saturday night is like a microwave burrito. Very tough to ruin something that starts out so bad to begin with.

Mr. Feld was right; life was like baseball, filled with loss and error, with bad hops and wild pitches, a game in which even champions lost almost as often as they won, and even the best hitters were put out seventy percent of the time.

In later years, holding forth to an interviewer or to an audience of aging fans at a comic book convention, Sam Clay liked to declare, apropos of his and Joe Kavalier's greatest creation, that back when he was a boy, sealed and hog-tied inside the airtight vessel known as Brooklyn, New York, he had been haunted by dreams of Harry Houdini.

I might spend 100 pages trying to get to know the world I'm writing about: its contours, who are my main characters, what are their relationships to each other, and just trying to get a sense of what and who this book is about. Usually around that point of 100 pages, I start to feel like I'm lost, I have too much material, it's time to start making some choices. It's typically at that point that I sit down and try to make a formal outline and winnow out what's not working and what I'm most interested in, where the story seems to be going.

See you in the funny papers," he said. Jaunty, he reminded himself; always jaunty. In my panache is their hope for salvation.