Louis Pasteur said, ‘Chance favors the prepared mind.’ If you’re really engaged in the writing, you’ll work yourself out of whatever jam you find yourself in.
Rueful, bittersweet, funny, written with tenderness and bite, Merrill Feitell’s stories, like so many classic short stories, are made from the plain and painful stuff of this world, and haunted by the possibility, and the impossibility, of a better one.
The instructor, Ms. Pease, also taught in the church’s religious school, and she had a Sunday school manner at once saccharine and condemnatory.
That’s why school was invented – to give your parents some peace and quiet during the day.
He comes to this other world and he has to reinvent himself. Again, it felt natural, even though I’d been working really hard trying to come up with something.
He took a step toward her, than another, tentatively, gathering all his strength, as though about to throw a heavy switch that would, if his calculations were correct, bring light to a hundred cities and ten thousand darkened rooms. He was going to ask her to dance – that was all.
A true storyteller is really good at writing himself into a corner and then finding a way out of that corner.
The world like our heads was meant to be escaped from, they are prisons world and head alike.
Misogyny comes naturally to a young man in his late teens; it is a function of the powerful homosocial impulses that flower along Fraternity Row, that drove the mod movements of the middle sixties and late seventies, that lie at the heart of every rock band formed by men of that age.
So it was scary, but that’s how it goes. To my great delight, I discovered that it did all belong.
I was thinking, too, of Superman and his fortress of solitude.
Miracles prove nothing except to those whose faith is bought very cheap, sir.
Childhood, at its best, is a perpetual adventure, in the truest sense of that overtaxed word: a setting forth into trackless lands that might have come to existence the instant before you first laid eyes on them.
It took Marvel Comics years to begin to put together any worthwhile superheroines. The first crop was, to a gal, embarrassingly disappointing. They had all the measly powers that fifties and sixties male chauvinism could contrive to bestow on a superwoman.
Novelist time is reptile time; novelists tend to be ruminant and brooding, nursers of ancient grievances, second-guessers, Tuesday afternoon quarterbacks, retrospectators, endlessly, like slumping hitters, studying the film of their old whiffs.
The rest of Sitka’s homicides are so-called crimes of passion, which is a shorthand way of expressing the mathematical product of alcohol and firearms.
What’s going to be hard for me is to try to divorce myself as much as possible from what I wrote. I’ll have to approach it simply as raw material and try to craft a film script out of it.
Do what you gotta do and stay fly.
Art is a form of exploration, of sailing off into the unknown alone, heading for those unmarked places on the map. If children are not permitted-not taught-to be adventurers and explorers as children, what will become of the world of adventure, of stories, of literature itself?
A delicate, inexorable lattice of inferences began to assemble themselves, like a crystal, in the old man’s mind, shivering, catching the light in glints and surmises.