The lamp-light, bright on his boots and dull on the autumn-leaf yellow of her hair, glinted along the paper as she turned a page with a flutter of slender muscles in her arms.

Жертву всегда губят ее привычки.

From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.” That sort of thing.

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