When the reader hears strong echoes of his or her own life and beliefs, he or she is apt to become more invested in the story.

To the devil with false modesty.

I have the world's best job. I get paid to hang out in my imagination all day.

The first real terror struck him then, and there was nothing supernatural about it. It was only a realization of how easy it was to trash your life. That was what was so scary. You just dragged the fan up to everything you had spent the years raking together and turned the motherfucker on.

The writer's original perception of a character or characters may be as erroneous as the reader's.

Las personas con un alto nivel de tolerancia al aburrimiento tienen tiempo de sobra para pensar.

The one thing about kids is that you never really know exactly what they're thinking or how they're seeing. After writing about kids, which is a little bit like putting the experience under a magnifying glass, you realize you have no idea how you thought as a kid. I've come to the conclusion that most of the things that we remember about our childhood are lies. We all have memories that stand out from when we were kids, but they're really just snapshots. You can't remember how you reacted because your whole head is different when you stand aside.