Woke up this morning with a terrific urge to lie in bed all day and read.

It's possible, in a poem or short story, to write about commonplace things and objects using commonplace but precise language, and to endow those things—a chair, a window curtain, a fork, a stone, a woman's earring—with immense, even startling power.

You're a beautiful drunk, daughter. But you're a drunk.

I loved you so much once. I did. More than anything in the whole wide world. Imagine that. What a laugh that is now. Can you believe it? We were so intimate once upon a time I can't believe it now. The memory of being that intimate with somebody. We were so intimate I could puke. I can't imagine ever being that intimate with somebody else. I haven't been.

Dreams, you know, are what you wake up from.

Fiction shows the external effects of internal conditions. Be aware of the tension between internal and external movement.

I am a cigarette with a body attached to it