We’ve just lost cabin pressure. I ask Marla what my name is. We’re all going to die.
Northeast Mississippi Avenue.
His name is Robert Paulson and he is forty-eight years old. His name is Robert Paulson, and Robert Paulson will be forty-eight years old, forever.
Ideally, you should be combining gesture, action, and expression with your dialogue.
You have to talk, otherwise your head turns into a cemetery.
Welcome to America, our never-ending, great popularity contest.
If you’ve never been in a fight, you wonder. About getting hurt, about what you’re capable of doing against another man.
Take full advantage of the complete freedom books provide. To not take advantage of that freedom is to waste the one chief strength of the medium.
Use attribution to control the delivery of dialogue, creating the sort of dramatic pause an actor would insert. Otherwise, the reader will race through a line without realizing how it ought to be weighted.
Oxygen gets you high. In a catastrophic emergency, you’re taking giant panicked breaths. Suddenly you become euphoric, docile. You accept your fate. It’s all right here. Emergency water landing – 600 miles an hour. Blank faces, calm as Hindu cows.
Street gangs were really young men raised without fathers, just trying to help one another become men.
Writers write because they weren’t invited to a party.
Don’t shy away from inventing rituals in your story. Invent rules and prayers. Give people roles to play and lines to recite. Include some form of communion and confession, a way for people to tell their stories and find connection with others.
The deal with dating conceited men like him was that she’d hoped some of his excess self-esteem would rub off. Women always secretly hoped this: that dating a narcissist would give them confidence by osmosis. It never worked.
So long as my checks cleared, I’d no interest in figuring down to the penny how poor I always was. For the same reason, I’ve put off writing a book on writing. I didn’t want to be faced with how little I could offer on the subject. How stupid I remained after all this time and practice.
Our greatest creation is our selves. The way we cultivate our appearance and behavior. And nowhere is our artwork more apparent than in our own minds. They way we each have an idea of self. The one perfect self we’ve chosen by rejecting all other options.
I love knowing a lot of people, but the downside is that means going to a lot of funerals.
If you’re dedicated to becoming an author, nothing I can say here will stop you. But if you’re not, nothing I can say will make you one.
And another thing,” he cautioned me, “don’t use a lot of commas. People hate sentences with lots of commas. Keep your sentences short. Readers like short sentences.
Think of a story as a stream of information. At best it’s an ever-changing series of rhythms. Now think of yourself, the writer, as a DJ mixing tracks.