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

You've got to work with your mistakes until they look intended. Understand?

A man without hands came to the door to sell me a photograph of my house. Except for the chrome hooks, he was an ordinary-looking man of fifty or so.

Something’s died in me,” she goes. “It took a long time for it to do it, but it’s dead. You’ve killed something, just like you’d took an axe to it. Everything is dirt now.

I am a cigarette with a body attached to it

Write about what you know, and what do you know better than your own secrets?

Then I said something. I said, Suppose, just suppose, nothing had ever happened. Suppose this was for the first time. Just suppose. It doesn't hurt to suppose. Say none of the other had ever happened. You know what I mean? Then what? I said.