Tellers of stories with ink on paper, not that they matter anymore, have been either swoopers or bashers. Swoopers write a story quickly, higgledy-piggledy, crinkum-crankum, any which way. Then they go over it again painstakingly, fixing everything that is just plain awful or doesn’t work. Bashers go one sentence at a time, getting it exactly right before they go on to the next one. When they’re done they’re done.
I am a basher. Most men are bashers, and most women are swoopers.

Occam’s Razor, or, if you like, the Law of Parsimony, to virtually any situation, to wit: The simplest explanation of a phenomenon is, nine times out of ten, say, truer than a really fancy one.

cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey out there,

He said, “Yes, dear colleague, including a single sentence which describes life as lived by human beings so completely that no writer after him need ever have written another word.”
“Which sentence was that, Mr. Trout?” I asked.
And he said, “ ‘All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players

I told Kilgore Trout at the clambake in 2001 about how my brother and sister had made Father ashamed of hunting and fishing. He quoted Shakespeare: “How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless child

If you really want to hurt your parents, and you don’t have nerve enough to be a homosexual, the least you can do is go into the arts

The African-American jazz pianist Fats Waller had a sentence he used to shout when his playing was absolutely brilliant and hilarious. This was it: “Somebody shoot me while I’m happy

The funniest American of his time, Mark Twain, found life for himself and everybody else so stressful when he was in his seventies, like me, that he wrote as follows: “I have never wanted any released friend of mine restored to life since I reached manhood

When I got home from my war, my uncle Dan clapped me on the back, and he bellowed, “You’re a man now!”
I damn near killed my first German.