A short story is the ultimate close-up magic trick – a couple of thousand words to take you around the universe or break your heart.
I am banished to the grey waste at the end of the world, but I mourn myself no longer; I cherish the pain in my hand. I imagine the taste of the mulberries in the violet dusk. And tomorrow I shall arrive in the town of Wei. Only the phoenix arises and does not descend. And everything changes. And nothing is truly lost.
I am not very good at writing for film yet, which is what keeps me interested in it.
She stood in the cold, which she did not feel anymore or which she felt all the time.
There were things I read as a boy that troubled me, but nothing that ever made me want to stop reading. I understood that we discovered what our limits were by going beyond them, and then nervously retreating to our places of comfort once more, and growing, and changing, and becoming someone else. Becoming, eventually, adult.
I wanted to keep you perfectly safe,” said Silas. “But there is only one perfectly safe place for your kind and you will not reach it until all your adventures are over and none of them matter any longer.
I remember when it was all done in first draft telling Gene Wolfe, who is the wisest writer I know, that I thought I had now learned how to write a novel. Gene looked at me, and smiled kindly. “You never learn how to write a novel,” he told me. “You only learn to write the novel you’re on.
Whatever you do, you have one thing that’s unique. You have the ability to make art. And for me, and for so many of the people I have known, that’s been a lifesaver. The ultimate lifesaver. It gets you through good times and it gets you through the other ones.
Life is sometimes hard. Things go wrong, in life and in love and and in business and in friendship and in health and in all the other ways that life can go wrong. And when things get tough, this is what you should do... Make good art. Probably things will work out somehow, and eventually time will take the sting away, but that doesn’t matter. Do what only you do best. Make good art. Make it on the good days too.
Make interesting, amazing, glorious, fantastic mistakes. Break rules. Leave the world more interesting for you being here. Make good art.
Ow. Blood for blood, eh, little lamb? It’s been too long since I’ve needed to sacrifice anything larger than a rabbit. Tch... There, let that be a lesson for me, Lyta, and for you too, if you can hear me: nothing is harmless. Nothing is too cute and sweet to be dangerous. Nothing is safe.
Morning Mister Mayhew” he said. It was not a welcoming “morning”. It was the kind of “morning” that implied that the speaker really did not care if the recipient lived or died – nor indeed, for that matter, if it was even morning.
But the man in the robe is talking. His voice is like the rustling of old parchments in a library, late at night, when the people have gone home and the books begin to read themselves.
We of the endless are the servants of the living – we are not their masters. We exist because they know, deep in their hearts, that we exist.
Far below the Silver City, the universe glitters and glistens, like a child’s toy; from this vantage point, galaxies cool and gleam like multicolored jewels, distant nebulae flicker and pulse.
Now Coraline,” said Miss Spink, “what’s your name?” “Coraline,” said Coraline.
Ah, list it to me, young Leander, young Hero, young Alexander. If you dare nothing, then when the day is over, nothing is all you will have gained.
Grown-ups and monsters aren’t scared of things.” “Oh, monsters are scared,” said Lettie. “That’s why they’re monsters.
The Fiddle Game was a fine and wonderful con. In its purest form it is a two-man grift. It trades on cupidity and greed, as all great grifts do. You can always cheat an honest man, but it takes more work.
Women and men, the old and the young of them: there are so many of them, and so many of their stories are tragedies with griefs too deep to be contained, but holding here and there tiny joys, snatched from the darkness like flowers picked by a fallen traveler from the side of a cliff.
I’m not a gorilla,” I said. “I am a human father.