True love always happens in a flash.

If you're going into a very dark place, then you should take a bright light, and shine it on everything. If you don't want to see, why in God's name would you dare the dark at all?

I try to create sympathy for my characters, then turn the monsters loose.

Take the dead from the dead, the old proverb said; only a corpse may speak true prophecy.

You can't deny laughter; when it comes, it plops down in your favorite chair and stays as long as it wants.

As with all other aspects of the narrative art, you will improve with practice, but practice will never make you perfect. Why should it? What fun would that be?

There are all sorts of dream interpretations, Freud's being the most notorious, but I have always believed they served a simple eliminatory function, and not much more - that dreams are the psyche's way of taking a good dump every now and then.