L. A. just doesn't seem real to me. Chicago does. My real friends are there. It's home.
A sense of wrongness, of fraught unease, as if long nails scraped the surface of the moon, raising the hackles of the soul.
Part of the appeal of the fantastic is taking ridiculous ideas very seriously and pretending they're not absurd.
I have danced with the spider. I have cut a caper with the dancing mad god.
For every action, there's an infinity of outcomes. Countless trillions are possible, many milliards are likely, millions might be considered probable, several occur as possibilities to us as observers - and one comes true.
My job is not to try to give readers what they want but to try to make readers want what I give.
I do, however, feel reasonably strongly the sense that the job of a piece of argumentative scholarly non-fiction is not the same as the job of a piece of fiction.
I suspect he's sweet on Sophie and doesn't like to see her work too hard. ' Tessa was glad to hear it. She'd felt awful about her reaction to Sophie's scar, and the thought that Sophie had a male admirer - and a handsome one like that- eased her conscience slightly. 'Perhaps he's in love with Agatha', she said. 'I hope not. I intend to marry Agatha myself. She may be a thousand years old, but she makes an incomparable jam tart. Beauty fades, but cooking is eternal.
Never speak of yourself to others; make them talk about themselves instead; therein lies the whole art of pleasing. Everybody knows it, and everyone forgets it.
The easy part of being an artist is figuring out the message that everyone else is ready to hear. The hard part is waiting for the proper lull to make the announcement.
Well I DO want to go up into space, but more than that, I'm dissatisfied with the fact that humans have only gone to the moon. I want to go to Mars! I want to eventually go beyond the solar system!