When I used to teach creative writing, I would tell the students to make their characters want something right away even if it's only a glass of water.
I think I succeeded as a writer because I did not come out of an English department. I used to write in the chemistry department. And I wrote some good stuff. If I had been in the English department,...
Archprophet
The truth was that life was as short and brutish and mean as ever. But people didn’t have to pay as much attention to the awful truth. As the living legend of the cruel tyrant in the city and the gent...
Poi si voltò verso di me, per farmi vedere com'era arrabbiata, e che quella rabbia era per me. Stava parlando tra sè, quindi quello che disse ad alta voce fu solo il frammento di una conversazione più...
Most of the company's employees were content to do what they were told and incurious as to how it was, exactly, that they had worked the miracles that somehow arrived all packaged and labeled and addr...
Listen - on the tenth night the peg was pulled out of the hasp on Billy's boxcar door, and the door was opened. Billy Pilgrim was lying at an angle on the corner-brace, self-crucified, holding himself...
Halyard yawned, and was annoyed to think that Lynn, who had just read order out of chaos as order out of koze, made three times as much money as he did. Lynn, or, as Halyard preferred to think of him,...
And Halyard suddenly realized that, just as religion and government had been split into disparate entities centuries before, now, thanks to the machines, politics and government lived side by side, bu...
To be is to do - SocratesTo do is to be - SartreDo Be Do Be Do - Sinatra
Whatever we've said, friends, we're saying still-- such as it was, such as it is, such as it will be
The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. Al...
The men wore loose loincloths that did little to conceal penes like pendulums on grandfather clocks. There
Maniacs in the Fourth Dimension, by Kilgore Trout.
I tried to write a story about a reunion between my father and myself in heaven one time. An early draft of this book in fact began that way. I hoped in the story to become a really good friend of his...
Bodies lay everywhere, in grotesque attitudes of violent death, but manifesting the miracle of life in a snore, a mutter, the flight of a bubble from the lips.
Billy now leaned over that parapat, looked down at all the people moving hither and yon. They were jerky little scissors. They were a lot of fun.
Americans . . . are forever searching for love in forms it never takes, in places it can never be.
Well finish your story anyway."Where was I?"The bubonic plague. The bulldozer was stalled by corpses."Oh, yes. Anyway, one sleepless night I stayed up with Father while he worked. It was all we could...
Years and years. Why did it have to happen? It was one more hollow echo to the question humanity had been asking for millenniums, the question men were seemingly born to ask