You mustn't compromise your principles, but you mustn't humiliate the opposition. No one is more dangerous than one who is humiliated.
Nothing was truly unbearable if you had something to read.
Just start the sentence. . . and see what happens. This is how we write.
Arithmetic is the death of story.
That's the hard work of writing. The imagining.
You might ask yourself why you want to surprise your readers in the first place. A surprise ending is sort of like a surprise party. Probably some people, somewhere, enjoy having friends and trusted colleagues lunge at them in the sudden blinding light of their own living room, but I don't think most of us do.
Dialogue is generally the worst choice for exposition. When you're writing lines you need to focus on the way people actually talk. And when we talk to each other we never actually explain our terms. We don't say 'Sweetheart, would you pass me the sugar bowl, which we picked up for a song at that antique stall in Munich. '
However, the occasional visit of success provides just the excitement an engineer needs to face work the following day.
It is impossible for the man of pious reflection not to perceive in it [the Constitution] a finger of that Almighty hand which has been so frequently and signally extended to our relief in the critical stages of the revolution.
Have fun, be yourself, enjoy life and stay positive.
And finally I twist my heart round again, so that the bad is on the outside and the good is on the inside, and keep on trying to find a way of becoming what I would so like to be, and could be, if there weren't any other people living in the world.