Might as well try to drink the ocean with a spoon as argue with a lover.

...writing fiction...is no job for intellectual cowards.

A writer's notebook is the best way in the world to immortalize bad ideas. My idea about a good idea is one that sticks around and sticks around and sticks around.

Say what you mean. Say what you see. Make a photograph, if you can, for the reader.

Homesickness is not always a vague, nostalgic, almost beautiful emotion, although that is somehow the way we always seem to picture it in our mind. It can be a terribly keen blade, not just a sickness in metaphor but in fact as well. It can change the way one looks at the world; the faces one sees in the street look not just indifferent but ugly... perhaps even malignant. Homesickness is a real sickness--the ache of the uprooted plant.

Until that afternoon in October four years ago, I hadn't known dogs could scream.

Things were going very fast now. Too fast to suit him. Fantasy and reality had merged.