The writer must have a good imagination to begin with, but the imagination has to be muscular, which means it must be exercised in a disciplined way, day in and day out, by writing, failing, succeeding and revising.

I think you're a taker. You've always been one. It's like God left some part of you out when He built you inside of me.

For a moment everything was clear, and when that happens you see that the world is barely there at all. Don't we all secretly know this? It's a perfectly balanced mechanism of shouts and echoes pretending to be wheels and cogs, a dreamclock chiming beneath a mystery-glass we call life. Behind it? Below it and around it? Chaos, storms. Men with hammers, men with knives, men with guns. Women who twist what they cannot dominate and belittle what they cannot understand. A universe of horror and loss surrounding a single lighted stage where mortals dance in defiance of the dark.

Sometimes life coughs up coincidences no writer of fiction would dare copy.

Her body was wrapped in shadows like moth wings, like rose-petals.

You needn't die happy when your time comes, but you must die satisfied, for you have lived your life from the beginning to the end and ka is always served.

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